Mr. Gerard Brady:

We have gone through a huge amount of work on this with our smaller members, in particular, but the big problem is even if they are doing qualifying research and development and could apply for the scheme, and get the money back, they are not applying for it because the administration is too burdensome for them. If a person is working six days a week running a company, he or she is not going to spend half of Sunday doing tax reports, and he or she cannot afford to pay the huge amount that accountants would demand to do it, so they do not bother. We have got lots of examples of that in smaller companies. Pro formatemplates could help. The UK has introduced this in recent years. It has online and offline pro forma templates that make it easy for SMEs to fill out what they need. Sometimes that means lower standards in terms of how much information they have to give to the Revenue Commissioners but that is the trade-off. They have to give less information in these templates. That means that they do not have to spend as much on administration and they will take it up, if that is the case. That has been the experience in the UK. It is just a time constraint; it does not work for them at the moment.