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Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

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Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#131
The same continuing income occurs for journalists and other fields that produce copyrighted output, in fact it's more true there since there isn't a substantial bug fixing load.

So why just software and not all fields that produce durable intellectual property?

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#132

We need temporary relief, immediately. But long term, how about we shrink the size of the federal government? Then we don’t have to flog small businesses to death to feed the massively inefficient and wasteful machine!?

These changes came about as part of the Trump administration & Republican efforts to reduce taxation. Because you can't trivially just cut taxes (as was done in 2017) without showing how you will either make up the missing revenue or reduce spending, they threw in a time-deferred measure - the new Section 174 that "demonstrated" how the tax cuts in 2017 would be paid for in the future. It was all sleight of hand, but what's new?

Republicans have been talking about shrinking the size of the federal government for decades. They routinely fail to come up with substantive cuts in spending that would not set off a disaster for them at the polls, or for the country economically, or both.

There is this perception that the federal is full of wasteful spending, but this perception is false (there is waste, it's not a large percentage of the huge overall federal budget). This means that to actually cut the revenue needed will require truly substantive cuts to the services provided and performed by the federal government.

Maybe you could be more successful at proposing what those cuts would be than any Republican has for 50 years, but it seems unlikely.

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#133

You got it all wrong, sure that first commit was R&D but the rest of the year? Maintenance. Or- sure we launched the platform and that was R&D but now we're just doing data entry.

The IRS document

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-23-63.pdf

is extremely clear on this. New features, improvements? All costs must be amortized. You can only expense bug fixes and GUI changes that don't add features.

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I amortize a server because you buy it now, it does work, then is eventually obsolete and you toss it. Does a developer keep doing work for me after he quits/dies?

The code you hired the developer to write/maintain should keep working for you after he quits/dies. Or you made a real bad investment.

Do you want hiring people to be considered as an investment?

I think that might have a lot of unintended side-effects.

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#135

I have said this before and attracted downvotes for it, but here goes. There are two possible arguments here to try, and I have only ever seen people lobbying against this change use the one, less persuasive argument. That argument is what I will call the "incentives" argument: that change in the rule provides bad incentives against doing R&D. This argument goes along the lines of "this will cost jobs for R&D workers…

>the responses to this argument I have seen from non-tech people range from "fuck you" to "deal with it."

Two factors also don't help matters either:

* Most people, which perhaps surprisingly includes most commenters here, don't understand what taxes are levied against or what losses and amortization even are. You can't effectively argue against something you don't understand.

* Of the people who do understand taxes and income/loss sheets, it's only the business owners and accountants who like putting as big a number as possible under losses to reduce net profit and thus taxes owed. The commons rightfully see it as tax avoidance, which unsurprisingly is met with "fuck you".

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#136
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it’s an election year so even a literal statement of fact is going to be downvoted by some people. Hopefully at some point they’ll have an epiphany about whether they should self-identify with a party so strongly when an accurate descriptions of its actions feels like an attack, but I’m not as optimistic about that as I used to be.

It’s a partisan statement since you only mention the upper tax bracket and not that it also slashed taxes for the lowest one completely and reduced them for basically everyone while making changes to a ton of other things (like child tax credits) as well. You’re over simplifying and singling out your pet political issue in an effort to sway opinion to your political leaning. If you had just said it was due to those t…

Most of the need for the reconciliation was the cut to the top tax bracket, where most of the the tax revenue comes from (e.g., the top 1% of earners pay 42% of the taxes [0]). So focusing on that bracket seems valid in this context.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-fe...

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#137

Take action and sign up for the Small Software Business Owners Association newsletter and petitions to the government: https://ssballiance.org/ Michele Hansen is doing an incredible job here and should be recognized for it. Latest news was sent yesterday: Republicans and Democrats finally struck a tax deal that includes a partial fix for Section 174. It includes expanding the Child Tax Credit, a key Democratic priori…

>a script to follow Going on a tangent here, but I always hated this idea of reading off a script to try and lobby politicians. If I were the politician, I would ignore all such communiques as indoctrinated spam.

Totally fair! I provided a script because many people have never contacted Congress before and might not know what to say, so it’s a way to make them more comfortable with the idea. They don’t necessarily have to use it.

Now for tweets, it’s important that each tweet is unique. Otherwise it’s clearly coordinated/automated. But as a casual scroll of Twitter shows, many people hate comfortable expressing themselves through that medium.

Also, I kinda wrote a whole book with scripts (for customer interviewing)… if I didn’t provide scripts, it just wouldn’t be true to my work!

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#138

This is exactly why I decided to not make my single-member, zero employee LLC an S Corp; if I'm paying no salaries, I don't have the Section 174 craziness. With an S Corp, you have to pay yourself a salary, and if your work is primarily software development, Section 174 might hit you. (IANAL or accountant. Talk to one of them.)

Unfortunately, this doesn’t erase the impact. This applies beyond salaries to all resources used for what 174 considers R&D. Servers, software, the desk chair you sit on to do development —- all have to be amortized under 174.

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#139
Possibly the most unpopular argument of all: do not comply.

Change your employees job titles and/or tax classifications if you have to. Whatever it takes to say "these are salaries, not R&D".

If you're big enough they'll notice, but for a 10-person company the risk of a bad audit beats certain bankruptcy.

Re: Thousands of small businesses are struggling because of R&D amortization

#140
post #96

I’m confused why this is so impactful. If you have software devs, even if you don’t classify as R&D, you can deduct their full salaries, right?

How would you classify software _developers_ if not under Research & _Development_?

"Hey boss, can you go ahead and change my job title to Code Janitor?"
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