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Wendy Lechner, legislative director for the Printing Industries of America, discusses how the Internal Revenue Service's definition of peripheral computer equipment affects printers and what PIA is doing to change that definition.
Printers have an enormous opportunity to see changes in the tax treatment of peripheral computer equipment, such as imagesetters and scanners, if the IRS continues to make progress on a new definition of this equipment. After learning late last year about the work being done by the IRS to change the definition, PIA became involved.
The U.S. Tax Code currently defines computer peripheral equipment as:
any auxiliary online or offline machine that is designed to be placed under the control of the central processing unit of a computer.
It further states that peripheral equipment does not include:
any equipment that is an integral part of other property which is not a computer, or any typewriter, calculator, adding and accounting machine, copier, duplicating equipment or similar equipment, or any equipment of any kind used primarily for amusement or entertainment of the user.
Given the changes to computer technology in the past two decades since this definition was written, some of the wording and examples are almost humorous. Granted, the IRS has supplemented the Tax Code with Treasury Department regulations that include items such as optical character readers, disk drives and plotters. However, printers - as well as their accountants - have been reluctant to rely on these limited examples,...