Originally Posted by
elZorro
No it's not. For one, we're generally talking about a small amount of tax refund, in the next (Labour) term it will be 12.5% of applicable R&D spend refunded. There's still a fair bit of paperwork involved, and it can be audited. Compare that to outfits like AgResearch, NIWA, HortResearch, IRL, many universities, who have a big chunk of their R&D work fully funded by the Taxpayer. They are not audited, but they do have to publish their findings eventually. With their internal costs and PR, legal teams, about 20%-30% of the funding actually gets spent on research.
I agree that dairies and other small businesses might find it hard to tap into R&D tax credits. But when you look at these smaller firms, they are often run by people who are learning the ropes of running a standalone enterprise, and sometimes they are there because they can't get a consistent job with good pay elsewhere. They need well-off customers, plenty of them. A strong, profitable manufacturing industry will provide that traffic, and a lot more jobs.
It's unfair that some get better tax treatment than others? How many times have you stood in front of a till in a dairy and heard the familiar ping of the "No Sale" button? Particularly if cash is offered. Manufacturers don't have a till, everything is recorded, and tax paid on it.
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