‘New’ Research Incentive Turns on Rolling Back a Trump Tax Tweak

The search for new tax incentives for research and development might lead back to the one that companies benefit from now but are set to lose soon under the 2017 tax law.

Proponents of R&D tax incentives like Intel Corp. won a victory earlier this month: They got a little-noticed bipartisan amendment added to Congress’s $3.5 trillion budget resolution that calls for sticking with the current way that companies record their R&D costs, scrapping a switch to a new method that goes into effect next year.

Tax professionals and corporate advocates say staying with the current approach would be much ...