Well, did you spend the $90k on W2 salaried employees, or to a vendor?
> Essentially, all R&E expenses...
The R&D tax credit was too good to be true anyway.
The crazy loopholes are crazy. What were people expecting?
Congress was not going to let people outsource "R&D", which in the bulk of cases is large companies like Accenture and small companies like bullshit agencies doing straight-up software customization that had little to do with real research or development.
Insofar as it affects startups, the amended law seems to exist explicitly to rein in the pro-forma declarations / reports template-generated by non-specialists.
Every tax or HR related firm in existence has been hawking this bullshit to tech companies for a while. Truly a bunch of parasites.
Congress needs to repeal the R&D tax credit as it exists today and allow people to ordinarily expense whatever it is that they are doing.
If it feels there is a good reason to make the money-to-US-salaries tax-reduced, it should make a simple blanket declaration checkbox for a narrow set of qualifications that would obviate the need of "R&D tax credit specialists."