Background: The company-internal reuse of software components owned by organizational units in different countries constitutes an implicit licensing across borders, which is taxable. This makes tax authorities a less known stakeholder in software architectures. Objective: Therefore, we investigate how software companies can describe the implicit license structure of their globally distributed software architectures to tax authorities. Method: We develop a viewpoint that frames the concerns of tax authorities, use this viewpoint to construct a view of a large-scale microservice architecture of a multinational enterprise, and 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. 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: While our software architecture description provides a solid foundation, we believe it only represents the tip of the iceberg. Future research is necessary to pave the way for advancements in tax compliance within software engineering.

翻译：背景：组织内部在不同国家拥有的软件组件在公司内部进行重用，构成了一种隐式的跨境许可，这种行为需要纳税。这使得税务部门成为软件架构中一个较少被提及的利益相关方。目标：因此，我们研究软件公司如何向税务部门描述其全球分布式软件架构中的隐式许可结构。方法：我们开发了一个用于界定税务部门关注点的视点，利用该视点构建了一家跨国企业大规模微服务架构的视图，并邀请一个由四位税务专家组成的小组对生成的软件架构描述进行了评估。结果：专家组认为我们提出的架构视点能够恰当且充分地界定税务利益相关方的关注点。然而，所有者司法管辖权不明确，以及代码所有权和软件组件的定义可能不够充分，给视图带来了显著的干扰，这限制了我们软件架构描述的实用性和解释力。结论：虽然我们的软件架构描述提供了一个坚实的基础，但我们认为它仅代表了冰山一角。未来的研究对于推动软件工程领域税务合规性的发展是必要的。