Point to me where they are allowed to exclude VAT, they aren't, companies don't even pay VAT as they deduct it from taxes which are expressely excluded anyway (rightfully). Even for employer social security contributions they are allowed to exclude only amounts up to ~13% of the employee compensation.mzivtins wrote: ↑06 Sep 2023, 09:43How else would you be able to define the costs of a company without doing this?dialtone wrote: ↑06 Sep 2023, 04:31Tax rebates should never count anyway. Top line spend should be the only thing that matters, raise the cap if needed. Having local laws determine how much you spend is so backwards I can’t even begin to describe it.peewon wrote:
RB would also have come under the cap had the rules been more clearer from the FIA from the start. The spend on parts for old cars for promotional purposes was initially not counted but later altered to count. This came very late in the day and RB was later caught out by not receiving the tax rebate they had anticipated. The difference was minimal despite the whingeing of rival TPs.
I think you have it the wrong way round in your head, if it was pre-tax then you would lose a large chunk of budget paying VAT to suppliers etc.
It is always done this way as it is the the only accurate way.
However for some reason, and I may be misunderstanding here, government incentives can be offset in the total costs ("downward adjustment in the calculation of relevant costs" from the doc https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files ... -02-18.pdf ). If my understanding is correct, this has nothing to do with how hard it is to calculate but it gives the ability to teams to claim government incentives and adjust costs lower. This would make no sense as it's not a level field like social security or income tax, get the government incentive as income but why adjust the relevant costs downward?
Another fun thing, the fines from violating the cap actually don't lower your cap the following year, lmao.