There is something similar in France, the Crédit Impôts Recherche (CIR), I remember it was around 50%. I've heard it's going to disappear though, there were abuses.
Hi, CIR expert here, it's well and alive. There has been a communication push against it last year but relatively over.
It's 30% of R&D expenses as a tax cut.
Update: I think the 50% you mention is related to non salary expenses CII = a smaller similar system for innovation, which we differentiate from R&D. CII used to cover non salary expenses with a 50% forfait but this part has been removed indeed. It still covers 20% of salary expenses.
It's quite common knowledge :) if you want journalist material, I think there was a Cash Investigation on the topic a few years ago.
I have discussed this topic with many other engineers (known from engineering school, from working 13+ years in the Paris tech startup ecosystem and from my worker union, whose scope include most tech companies) and I have never heard any of them saying they did not write bullshit CIR reports for bullshit projects. I have myself written my fair share of those bullshit reports. There are even companies whose business is to write the bullshit reports for you in exchange for x% of your CIR credit. I worked with such company.
My experience is different, so far I've defended R&D that I believed to be eligible to tax credits, in order for companies to be competitive with other countries that also subsidize R&D and innovation, namely USA and Canada.
You can't generalize a 7 billion tax cut system based on one journalist work (the same and the same is quoted again...), opinions based on a few rotten fruits in the basket, and an anti-startup trend that amplifies this hatred for political and ideological reasons.
My experience, from 20 years as well, aligns with widespread abuses. Pretty much the whole financial sector is sponsored by the CIR, none of which contribute anything beyond the bullshit reports mentioned above. I myself wrote countless reports like that, most of them vastly autogenerated to look pompous.
I don't remember having to defend anything to get the CIR, it's more of a judgment call on whether you feel confident to defend it if you get an audit, and these are very rare. We've had such audit in the past, and it made everyone rewrite each submitted report in a hurry to make them look more serious. No sanction were applied.
At this point, my opinion is that the CIR has very little to do with actual research, but rather it's a discretionary tax subsidy for sectors in which France wants to be competitive.
It's not only the tech startups, I've mentioned it because that's what a know best, but my brother works for a large industrial company, and they use the same tricks and also have their reports done by professional bullshit companies whose jobs is to make it look like some research happened (in their case it's sometimes somewhat the case - unlike tech startups - but most of it is just bullshit).
It's also capricious. I've been in companies doing legitimate r&d who would spend man months preparing for the CIR only to get it rejected, while they got it in previous years for much less interesting work.
