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

Post by AlbertCory » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #148

AlbertCory wrote: post #120

I've been researching this for another issue. Anyhow, expensing R&D is a perennial political issue. Logically, if you're creating an income-producing asset, then you have to depreciate it over its useful life. The theory is sound, but of course politicians can mess with it, as they do. But I thought the "useful life" of software was 3 years. No?

You usually want to incentivize R&D, messing with that simple theory is the standard. Anyway, even that 3 years common knowledge number is biased into long-lived code. Do you spend work time putting out fires? Do you write code that is immediately discovered to be wrong so you have to take more time and fix it? Those 3 years are only for software that already passed through all of that. (Anyway, I don't have any inte…

Post by thebeardisred » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

Dalewyn wrote: post #109

telesilla wrote: post #39

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.

Post by tchock23 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #168

addicted wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re calling this a business priority for the Republicans when it was a Republican House, Senate and President that passed this measure. That’s a bit too “must make it seem bipartisan” when there is a clear partisan direction. Even when this fix is passed, it will be voted for unanimously by Democrats and only a small fraction of Republicans will vote for it. Explain again to me how that makes it a Republican prio…

> Even when this fix is passed, it will be voted for unanimously by Democrats and only a small fraction of Republicans will vote for it. Like the unanimous democrat vote to repeal the SALT limits that overwhelming impacts people in California and NY?

Post by BenFranklin100 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #121

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…

Post by tchock23 » Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 8:06 PM UTC

slotrans wrote: post #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.