In the Washington Technology Industry Association blog, Lewis McMurran writes about the Senate budget and the very-soon-to-be-released House budget. On the House budget, he says,

It will likely look more like the Governor’s than the Senate’s.  We can anticipate at least $1 billion in new taxes or reducing tax incentives. We fully expect there will be efforts to end the R&D tax incentives widely used by the IT and life sciences industries.

There has been a great deal of scrutiny of the R&D tax incentives, especially since the Joint Legislative Audit Review Committee or JLARC, put out its tax preference study that took a very detailed, but flawed, examination of the impact of the R&D incentives.  The study found that the B&O credit, in and of itself, created a mere 454 jobs. What the study did not do is look at the impact of the $7.7 billion in R&D is done in Washington, how many jobs that created, how much tax revenue was generated from that activity and other spinoff benefits.

We countered the JLARC study’s look at R&D incentives in this policy brief (beginning on page 3): Leveling the Playing Field with Tax Preferences. (For more on the tech industry in Washington, see our economic profile from last year.)