James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Boyd Barrett has legitimate concerns about the Bill and that the abuse of the legislation could lead to tax avoidance and tax evasion, but if we take it as a fundamentally good thing to encourage innovation, research and development through the tax code we should not stop doing that just because it may be abused by certain parties. Let us do something good and stop any abuse by other means. I worked on a project which qualified for the research and development tax credit and it is not as easy as the Deputy might think to reassess and resubmit for the scheme. It is difficult to qualify and, provided the criteria are sufficiently tight and rigorous, abuses should be prevented. Repeat inventions do not qualify and submitting the same thing again with a few tweaks is not sufficient to be rare, non-obvious or novel. I understand the Deputy's concerns but I do not think they are well founded.