Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.
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Corporate taxes are calculated on net income, i.e. revenue minus expenses. Amounts paid to employees (e.g. to do R&D) are expenses. The tax code defines which years you can deduct the expenses. Sometimes it requires you to deduct them in a later year than you incurred them, even though that's asinine and encourages companies to do buybacks instead of investing in R&D.
In years when the tax code changes, it thereby causes there to be years when companies are deducting both this year's expenses and previous year expenses they couldn't deduct earlier, and other years when they deducted less than they actually spent. The total deductions are still equal to expenses, but then disingenuous critics point to a low "cash" rate in the year deductions were shifted into, ignoring that it only happened because they weren't allowed to deduct those expenses in a previous year when they were actually incurred.
Taxed generally don't use cash-based accounting and if they did then the companies would have been able to deduct those expenses sooner.