Background: The company-internal reuse of software components owned by organizational units in different countries is taxable. Objective: In this article, we introduce the concerns of tax authorities as stakeholders and investigate how software companies can describe their globally distributed software architectures to tax authorities. Method: In an experimental simulation, 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 found our proposed architectural viewpoint properly and sufficiently frames the concerns of taxation stakeholders. The architecture description reveals that almost 70% of all reuse relationships between the 2560 microservices from our case company are cross-border and, therefore, taxable. 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: Although our software architecture description already provides a solid foundation and reveals the importance of tax compliance in software architectures, we stumbled over several fundamental open questions, forming new frontiers in software engineering.

翻译：背景：不同国家的组织单元所拥有的软件组件在内部复用可能涉及税务问题。目的：本文引入税务机关作为利益相关方，探讨软件公司如何向税务机关描述其全球分布式软件架构。方法：通过实验模拟，我们（1）构建了反映税务机关关注点的视角框架，（2）创建了某跨国企业的大规模全球分布式微服务架构视图，并（3）邀请四名税务专家对所生成的软件架构描述进行评估。结果：专家组认为，我们提出的架构视角能够恰当且充分地界定税务相关利益方的关注点。架构描述显示，案例公司2560个微服务中近70%的复用关系属于跨境复用，因此需缴纳税款。然而，所有者管辖权限界定不清、代码所有权及软件组件的定义可能不够充分，给视图引入了显著干扰，限制了软件架构描述的实用性和解释力。结论：尽管我们的软件架构描述已提供坚实基础并揭示了税务合规在软件架构中的重要性，但我们仍遇到了若干根本性开放问题，这构成了软件工程领域的新前沿。