Tax Compliance in Software Engineering

On the 11th of October 2023, Microsoft published an update about its ongoing audit with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), according to which the IRS alleges that Microsoft owes an additional $28.9 billion in tax, plus penalties and interest. In this blog post, we explain the background of this legal dispute and discuss why this lawsuit boils down to a software engineering problem and how software engineering research can remediate it.

In third and last blog post in the series on tax compliance in software engineering, we will estimate the prevelance of cross-border collaboration, and therefore, the need for tax compliance in software engineering by measuring cross-border code review in a multinational software company.

In this second blog post in the series on tax compliance in software engineering, we will discuss the unique and fundamental challenges of taxing collaborative software engineering.

In this first blog post in the series on tax compliance in software engineering, we start with a gentle introduction to international standards in multinational taxation and its basic Arm’s Length Principle from a software engineering perspective.