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If ycombinator hires 3 engineers to rewrite hacker news 2.0, pays them for a year, writes off their salary as an expense, and then later decides that actually 2
by sahila 3y ago
If ycombinator hires 3 engineers to rewrite hacker news 2.0, pays them for a year, writes off their salary as an expense, and then later decides that actually 2.0 is way worse than what’s currently out and trashes it, should ycombinator not be allowed to write off the investment?
- djur 3y agoNo.
- sokoloff 3y agoDo you think that every failed A/B test should be not a valid business expense? Only winning tests are valid business expenses? If an employee is paid for a sick day, PTO, or parental leave, or to attend a team-building event: what have they created with that money? The government must not allow such giveaways from the tax coffers! All kinds of individual activities are permitted in profit-seeking businesses and not all of them are subject to “in order to deduct this, you have to have omniscient judgment and every individual action must locally optimize your business”.
- djur 3y agoIf a tax benefit relies on destroying an asset, to claim the benefit it should be necessary to demonstrate that you've made a good faith effort to sell it for fair market value. Courts supervise this kind of thing in bankruptcies all the time. Seems reasonable to put a high (multi-million) floor on the write-off before this kicks in.