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10% Tax On Custom Software, $100M Tax Cut For Microsoft
reifman writes "Last week, the Washington State House of Representatives passed a bill which would impose a 10% tax on custom software while all but eliminating a $100 million yearly tax obligation that some say Microsoft is wrongfully avoiding by routing large chunks of business through an office in Nevada. 'I believe we've got an issue of justice and fairness here,' said Rep. Maralyn Chase. 'Most of the custom software purveyors are small businesses. It's a question for me of how we fairly distribute the tax burden.' 'It means that a 5 person team of entrepreneurs building a cool custom software suite, or a group of system integrators, would face a 10% tax on their services while keeping the exact same project in-house would not be taxed,' wrote Rep. Reuven Carlyle. 'It would be a massive blow to the entrepreneurial community in our state.' The bill won't become law until the House and Senate work out how best to raise another $300 million in taxes. A sales tax increase on consumers is also being considered."
I propose a 20% tax on people who pass stupid laws!
Andrew Stack would be upset at having to pay any taxes. He was also a loony. The selective 10% on custom software is a supremely stupid thing, but invoking the name of an anti-government crackpot isn't helpful.
Too late, it's already done. Now as for the reason why it isn't law, law yet is a puzzling one: they apparently need to find another 300 million in tax revenue and have completely inored the most obvious: closing the MS tax dodge instead of giving them a free pass that this bill just did. Or they could just I don't know cut all the extraneous crap that they shouldn't be doing to begin with but I suppose that actually solving the problem would piss off everyone dependent on the bloat.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Oddly enough, if they stopped using Microsoft products they could recoup a large amount of that money anyways. I have reviewed the IT expenditures of several state agencies and they are blowing money like its no tomorrow, but they have no clue how to get efficiencies because they are so star struck by the crap MS has been dishing out to them for years.
I'm willing to bet the law won't be written by anyone who knows anything about "Custom Software".
What you call "hoarding", I call "saving" and the general lack of savings in America is a Bad Thing (tm).
-- I wonder if MS has special hidden algorithms in their software: if state=Washington and query="how much state tax Microsoft should pay", then answer=0. --
You see, that's the problem with closed source software; we'll never know.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.