Mr. Niall Cody:

I can certainly talk in general terms around the R&D credit. Fifteen hundred and thirty-six companies claimed the R&D credit in 2015. They claimed a total of €708 million. Each year, the amount of the R&D credit has gone up. The policy decisions around R&D has been to broaden the scope of the credit and a number of years ago, a refundable element was brought into the R&D credit. As I said in my opening remarks, the R&D credit was subject to an examination by the Comptroller and Auditor General in the 2015 accounts and we had a discussion about it here, back in June, on the level of audit that we carry out on the R&D credit.

The significant issue around R&D credit is ultimately a policy issue. Ireland is keen to deepen the involvement higher up the development chain of companies in Ireland and the R&D credit is seen as a support of that process. The Department of Finance did a review on that and published it last year. The most significant proportion of the R&D credit is claimed by large multinational companies because they are spending the biggest proportion of the money on the R&D credits, and that just makes sense.

In the report we published in April 2017, we gave some significant breakdown of the R&D element, by sector and by multinational, compared to small companies. On the 13 cases, we could certainly show the number of them that were in receipt of the R&D credit. Some of them were in receipt of both the double tax and the R&D credit, depending on where they were. I refer to the impact, if you took out the R&D credit. Mr. Seamus Coffey gets mentioned a lot when we discuss corporation tax receipts. One of the things he did was he did a commentary on the chapter and he highlighted the fact that the R&D credit is actually related to expenditure, and it is not like the companies can get a kind of free credit. They have to spend this money on R&D.