The engineering of complex software systems is often the result of a highly collaborative effort. However, collaboration within a multinational enterprise has an overlooked legal implication when developers collaborate across national borders: It is taxable. In this article, we discuss the unsolved problem of taxing collaborative software engineering across borders. We (1) introduce the reader to the basic principle of international taxation, (2) identify three main challenges for taxing collaborative software engineering making it a software engineering problem, and (3) estimate the industrial significance of cross-border collaboration in modern software engineering by measuring cross-border code reviews at a multinational software company.

翻译：复杂软件系统的工程常源于高度协作的努力。然而，在跨国企业中，开发者跨境协作时存在一个被忽视的法律问题：这种协作是可征税的。本文讨论了跨境协作软件工程赋税这一未解决的问题。我们（1）向读者介绍国际税收的基本原理，（2）识别出将协作软件工程赋税问题转化为软件工程问题的三大主要挑战，以及（3）通过衡量某跨国软件公司的跨境代码审查，估算现代软件工程中跨境协作的行业重要性。