Hold on. Tax implications of androids ?! Explain
Okay so bear with me here. A big point made in the game is that people are being displaced in the workforce by androids. Also, there is a point in the game where you find out household androids retail for around $10,000 USD, which is ridiculously cheap for a piece of machinery that advanced. Cars cost a lot more and are way less advanced. Me, being a tax accountant at the time the game came out, I started thinking about how business would treat the purchase of androids for financial reporting and tax purposes. First off, if we assumed that work model androids went for the same cost (though they could cost more who knows), it makes a sickening amount of sense that companies were just buying a whole bunch of androids and booting out human workers. They could easily buy like 4 to 7 androids for the cost of one basic office worker's salary alone. And they wouldn't have to pay any kind of payroll taxes for them, wouldn't have to worry about things like healthcare or benefits packages. Androids need none of that. They're machines, you'd treat them just like any other machine. And then you get to the thing that really got stuck in my head: depreciation. See when businesses buy assets like machinery or equipment or, in this case, androids, they don't have to record that full expense in the year they buy them. They can depreciate those assets over a period of years, a bit at a time, recording a portion of the expense on their income statement each year.
For example, a company could depreciate an android over a period of 5 years (the standard depreciation period we currently use for vehicles). That means for five years they can record $2,000 of the original cost of that $10,000 android each year. That looks much nicer on the yearly income statements compared to booking the $10,000 expense all in the same year.
A company's depreciation expense reduces the amount of earnings on which they pay taxes in a given year, reducing the amount of taxes they owe. And thus it's obvious that greedy corporations would flock to the idea of replacing their human workforce with androids.
Don't become an accountant. It makes you think of all sorts of weird shit like this in every type of media you consume.
