[dingaling]

Having worked in some Fortune 100s we never counted software development as R&D unless it was true blue-sky work unassociated with a project.

All the routine work was included in Run The Business budgeting just like tangible material purchases.

[drcharris]

On a number of occasions, as a (software) program manager at several very large firms, I was tasked with taking every single piece of work that happened in the previous calendar year and seeing whether we could classify it as 'R&D' in order to qualify for one of the many tax breaks on offer in the various places that we did business.

The criteria for qualification usually boiled down to 'was there an element of unknown quantity in the project?' - which left enormous room for interpretation, as basically anything that wasn't maintenance (RTB) could be justified.

We would regularly, across the firm, get $50m tax benefits a year out of this effort.

I'm not an accountant, but I'd be interested in just how rigorous the notion of 'R&D' is in a company's annual returns. It smells of PR to me.