“In the case of a taxpayer’s specified research or experimental expenditures for any taxable year” …
Seems pretty obvious to me that the section only applies to what is claimed as R&E. Software development doesn’t have to be claimed as R&E, but if it is, now it unambiguously qualifies.
You don't specify what is R&E, the statute does. It's specified in the next section, and section c(3):
" “specified research or experimental expenditures” means, with respect to any taxable year, research or experimental expenditures which are paid or incurred by the taxpayer during such taxable year in connection with the taxpayer’s trade or business."
and
"For purposes of this section, any amount paid or incurred in connection with the development of any software shall be treated as a research or experimental expenditure."
Isn't the main problem that this change forces all software development, regardless of purpose, to be classified as R&E and therefore forced to be amortized?
No! That’s what confused CPAs are telling gullible startup founders.
Nothing forces you to classify engineering salaries or even contract expenses under the provisions of section 174 which describe “research and experimental expenditure”. There are some reasons historically why people elected to do that, but that may be a bad idea moving forward and honestly seems rather dishonest to me. No, your Jira clone is not “research and experimental expenditure”, it’s just a fucking database with a UI… just like 97% of all other startups. It’s more like: if you can use section 174 because you spun up a project to research curing diabetes with nano bots, then your software development allocated towards the project also counts as R&E, cheers.
Repeat after me: “my core business is not a research and experimental expenditure, it’s just a normal mundane boring operating expense”.
Seems pretty obvious to me that the section only applies to what is claimed as R&E. Software development doesn’t have to be claimed as R&E, but if it is, now it unambiguously qualifies.