Background: The company-internal reuse of software components owned by organizational units in different countries is taxable. To comply with international taxation standards, multinational enterprises need to consider a geographical perspective on their software architecture. However, there is no viewpoint that frames the concerns of tax authorities as stakeholders towards a globally distributed software architecture. Objective: In this article, we introduce the reader to the concerns of tax authorities as stakeholders and we investigate how software companies can describe their globally distributed software architectures to tax authorities. Method: In an in-virtuo experiment, 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 of tax experts found that our proposed architectural viewpoint properly and sufficiently frames the concerns of taxation stakeholders. However, the resulting view falls short: Although the architecture description reveals that almost 70% of all reuse relationships between the 2560 microservices in our case are cross-border and, therefore, taxable, unclear jurisdictions of owners and a potentially insufficient definition of ownership introduce significant noise to the view that limits its usefulness and explanatory power of our software architecture description. Conclusion: Although our software architecture description provides a solid foundation for the subsequent step, namely valuing software components, we stumbled over several theoretical and practical problems when identifying and defining ownership in distributed teams, which requires further interdisciplinary research.

翻译：背景：不同国家的组织单位所拥有的软件组件在企业内部进行重用可能涉及税务问题。为符合国际税收标准，跨国企业需从地理分布视角审视其软件架构。然而，目前尚缺乏一种视角框架，能将税务主管部门作为利益相关者的关切点纳入全球分布式软件架构的考量。目标：本文旨在向读者介绍税务主管部门作为利益相关方的关切点，并探究软件企业如何向税务部门描述其全球分布式软件架构。方法：通过一项虚拟实验，我们（1）构建了反映税务主管部门关切的视角框架，（2）为某跨国企业的大型全球分布式微服务架构创建了视图视图，（3）邀请四位税务专家组成评审小组评估最终生成的软件架构描述。结果：税务专家评审小组认为，我们提出的架构视角框架能恰当且充分地反映税务利益相关者的关切。但生成的视图存在不足：尽管架构描述显示案例中2560个微服务间近70%的重用关系属于跨境行为（因此需要纳税），但所有者管辖权不明确以及所有权定义可能不够充分，导致该视图存在显著噪音，限制了其效用及对软件架构描述的解释力。结论：虽然我们的软件架构描述为后续步骤（即软件组件估值）提供了坚实基础，但在识别和定义分布式团队所有权时遭遇了若干理论与实践问题，这需要进一步开展跨学科研究。