Case Study

Case Study: Software

    • 03-03-2023
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Qualifying R&D Activity

Among many R&D projects at Datawheel, a number of qualifying projects were derived from their DataLocation services. One is Data USA: A platform that leverages over 21 different publicly available data sets to serve as a public service tool to enable informed decision making. This platform synthesizes and visualizes available public data sets such as: labor data, economic data, & other types of social data to provide an improved comprehension of the US as a whole.

Another qualifying project includes data synthesis and visualization for the Center for Disease Control (CDC). This unique platform provides a public health law information portal with online visualization tools for legal epidemiology datasets provided by the CDC. The project was developed in late 2020 and has faced several challenges that were solved through a process of experimentation into how to ingest, structure, and organize data.

Benefit: $349,332 in Federal and State R&D Tax Credits!

Once Leyton’s tax and technical teams qualified the related expenses to their research and development projects, we were able to build a substantive R&D Tax Credit claim for the client, backed by a comprehensive R&D Study that explains how each project meets the IRS criteria to claim the credit. Datawheel has been claiming their Federal R&D Tax Credit with Leyton since 2016.

For their 2020 R&D Claim, we were able to qualify the following QRE (Qualified Research Expenses) for Datawheel:

70% of employee salaries qualified: job titles include software architects, economists, front end and back end developers, CTO, & Co-founders.
48% of contractor costs.
48% of cloud computing costs for developing data visualization platforms.

From 2016 to 2020, Leyton has helped this client claim a gross amount of $349,332 in Federal and State R&D Tax Credits!

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It was an interesting exercise to look back at our projects and uncover qualifying R&D. We filed amended returns, recouped the money, and put it back into the company!

Dave Landry, Co-founder, Datawheel Datawheel