In my opinion, companies shouldn’t be allowed to expense anything. The entire concept is pointlessly complicated and only serves to favor businesses that can afford to hire teams of accountants. The law doesn’t encourage any kind of value adding on the slightest, it’s just a game to save money.
There are complicated parts of accounting, but basic expense tracking is simple and businesses would do it even if it didn’t affect their tax treatment.
If businesses couldn’t write off expenses, it would be nearly equivalent to treating the corporate income tax as a universal sales tax. This would be incredibly damaging to small businesses and benefit behemoth vertically integrated companies, which is probably the exact opposite of what you want.
If you get rid of expenses, you need to get rid of corporate income tax and either replace it with VAT or combine it with increases to personal income tax like taxing capital gains as ordinary income.
