Episode Details

Connect with Casey Barka:

Website: www.striketax.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseybarka/

Lisa Ryan:: Hey. It's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the manufacturer's network podcast. I'm here today with Casey Barker. Casey is an R&D tax credit expert with 20 years of industry knowledge and nine years of proven experience calculating R&D tax credits for major accounting and financial service firms. Before co-founding Strike, Casey spent eight years in the petrochemical industry in Houston, Texas. His distinguished knowledge of the dynamic properties of polyethylene polypropylene and styrene-butadiene copolymer resins drove significant department improvement. I'm glad I got all those out. And, Casey, welcome to the show.

Casey Barka::: Thank you very much, Lisa. Glad to be here.

Lisa Ryan:: share a little about your background and what led you to do what you're doing.

Casey Barka:: I hail from the great state of Wisconsin originally. My bachelor's is actually in biochemistry and molecular biology. I had hopes and aspirations of going into the medical field. And as life hands you lemons, I went to the army and traveled the world for a few years. Happy to have served my country there. And after that, I found my way to Houston, Texas, an oil and gas hub. It was a very natural landing place for me. I spent 8 to ten years with various large Chevron Total big names in the industry, primarily focused on plastics and polymers; as you mentioned, I got my MBA as I worked up the corporate ladder. I just happened upon a job posting for research and development Credit Consulting, and it hurt my interest. And as the story goes, here we are ten years later. I co-founded Strike Tax Advisory, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. I am leading part of a team here in Houston. And, yeah, really excited to talk to your group about how R&D tax credits can benefit the manufacturing industry.

Lisa Ryan:: Let's start at the very beginning. What is an R&D tax credit? And how does it relate to manufacturing? Why do we care?

Casey Barka:: Okay. Good question. For those of you that may not be familiar, the research and development tax credit, its common name, officially, is the credit for increasing research activities. This is section 41 of the Art of the tax code. It's been around since the early eighties. That's a Ronald Reagan-era credit. It was meant to incentivize US-based companies to keep those high-tech, high-paying jobs here in the US as opposed to being offshored to that was the primary driver. It's technically a glorified jobs credit if you want to get down to it. Over the last 40-plus years, there have been many changes to the tax code itself.

There's been a lot of judicial precedent that has been established that goes into what is R&D and what is not R&D. That's primarily our job is to help our clients determine what expenses they are incurring on what we consider to be an R&D project. That can be anything from a product. It can be a process. It can be a formulation, invention, or technique. It can be it's an extensive bird. Not only to the manufacturing industry but also applies to many food and beverage architecture, engineering, medical, and pharmaceutical software; we work with many different industries. Manufacturing is the number 2 or 3 industry we work with here at Stripe. And as you're getting into manufacturing itself, there are many sub-industries that we work with. Everything from agriculture to apparel and textiles, Oil And Gas is there. Robotics, tool and die manufacturers, and semiconductors. The list goes on, and we work with these R&D tax credits.

Lisa Ryan: [00:04:12]:

So you mentioned that I thought about what R&D is and isn't fascinating. It just sounds like it's research and development