Describing Globally Distributed Software Architectures for Tax Compliance
arxiv(2023)
摘要
Background: The company-internal reuse of software components owned by
organizational units in different countries is taxable. Objective: In this
article, we introduce the concerns of tax authorities as stakeholders and
investigate how software companies can describe their globally distributed
software architectures to tax authorities. Method: In an experimental
simulation, we (1) develop a viewpoint that frames the concerns of tax
authorities, (2) create a view of a large-scale, globally distributed
microservice architecture from a multinational enterprise, and (3) evaluate the
resulting software architecture description with a panel of four tax experts.
Results: The panel found our proposed architectural viewpoint properly and
sufficiently frames the concerns of taxation stakeholders. The architecture
description reveals that almost 70
microservices from our case company are cross-border and, therefore, taxable.
However, unclear jurisdictions of owners and potentially insufficient
definitions of code ownership and software component introduce significant
noise to the view that limits the usefulness and explanatory power of our
software architecture description. Conclusion: Although our software
architecture description already provides a solid foundation and reveals the
importance of tax compliance in software architectures, we stumbled over
several fundamental open questions, forming new frontiers in software
engineering.
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