4 ms·

You can still pay employees to write software and treat it as a regular expense. But if you want preferable treatment for R&D expenses now you need to amortize

• olliej 3y ago
  The problem is that I don't understand what the preference is. If your employee has a salary of $X, then the taxable expense should only be $X, it does not matter what the employee is doing. So I don't understand what the benefit of classifying an employee's salary as being R&D was prior to this rule change. That's the whole point of my question. As far as I can tell, every actual expense is tax deductible, which (from the complaints) implies that either there's an expense I'm not aware of that is no longer deductible (which seems bad), that the R&D classification allowed you to move when you claimed the expenses regardless of when they were actually incurred, or that R&D was used to classify non-expenses as if they were expenses. Only the first option seems reasonable to complain about, the 2nd seems of limited use (based on the complaints being made), and if it's the last option I would think everyone would support the rule change as the last option is imo fraud. From the way people are complaining I'm assuming that it's not the last option, but I do not understand what the issue is here, because I don't understand what this mysterious "R&D" expense is, if not salaries, consumables, and equipment depreciation. Which are all taxable expenses.