It also violates the fundamental rule that changing a sentence into the passive voice does not effect a semantic change.
"The employee shall be reimbursed [by the employer] for all expenses." must necessarily mean the same as "The employer shall reimburse the employee for all expenses."
Legal text doesn't come with a list of definitions that attempt to lock e.g. "shall" down in stone.
But it's the same ambiguity, isn't it? Essentially whether "shall" creates an obligation for the taxpayer to claim it as R&D expense or an obligation for the IRS to accept it as R&D expense if the taxpayer so claims it, the equivalent of whether "shall" applies to the employee or the employer.
And in both cases the existence of the ambiguity is bolstered by the fact that the overly literal interpretation leads to a ridiculous result.
What? No. How are you reading "the taxpayer shall do X" to mean "the IRS must do X"?
The text is incredibly straightforward: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/174
> (1) except as provided in paragraph (2), no deduction shall be allowed for such expenditures, and
> (2) the taxpayer shall—
> (A) charge such expenditures to capital account, and
> (B) be allowed an amortization deduction of such expenditures ratably over the 5-year period [...]
Does it
(a) define the rules and conditions under which a taxpayer may claim a deduction on R&D expenditure
or
(b) define the obligations of the taxpayer with respect to anything that Sec 174 defines as R&D expenditure (i.e. you must report it as such, charge it to a capital account, claim an amortization deduction)
AFAIK, nothing the IRS or Congress has said thus far has clarified this.
(I'm not saying it's good or bad, just passing on information.)
Perhaps it can be can be made ambiguous in some context if you try hard enough, but that doesn't mean it commonly is so, or that it is here.
> I'm sure this isn't the best tutorial on the topic but it gives you a taste: https://www.barandbench.com/columns/shall-shocked-the-use-of...
Thanks, but the only thing that link gave me a taste for is terrible strawman arguments. (Or a severe lack of understanding of basic English.)
If you have "shall be" in a sentence, then that phrase is the verb of interest whose ambiguity (or lack thereof) you must examine, not the "shall" on its own. Claiming "shall" is ambiguous because it changes meaning when you put "be" after it makes no sense. It comes across as the kind of argument a first-grader would make.
They write: If the substitution rule is applied in the sentence: “The employee shall be reimbursed all expenses”, you would get: “The employee has a duty to be reimbursed all expenses”. This created ambiguity for the simple reason that the intent appeared to state an entitlement of the employee and not to impose a duty on the employee.
Do they lack common sense when reading this, or do they struggle with English? It's like claiming "I have a carrot" is somehow ambiguous because "I have been a carrot" means something entirely different. Does that sentence need disambiguation with "I possess a carrot" or "I have a carrot, but have not existed, as a carrot"? Are these serious arguments?