Changes announced late last year concerning the R&D tax relief scheme come into force on April 1 this year, are you ready?
Aiming to put UK at the forefront of R&D and help companies compete on the world stage, the government has introduced various R&D tax reliefs, including R&D for small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), universities and charities, as well as R&D Expenditure Credit for large companies.
From 1 April 2021, the new SME R&D tax credit scheme will take effect, with the introduction of a cap on the amount of credits that could be claimed.
An overview of the SME R&D tax relief scheme
When the SME R&D tax credit schemed was first introduced in 2000, it had a cap on the amount of credits that a company could claim. In 2012, the cap was removed, thereby allowing eligible companies to deduct an extra 130% of their qualifying costs from their yearly profit, as well as the normal 100% deduction, making it a total of 230% deduction. Even when a company was making losses, it could still claim a tax credit worth up to 14.5% of the surrendarable losses.
The system was subject to abuse and fraud – HMRC announced that they had detected and prevented fraudulent claims amounting to over £300m in recent times. Many deceptions included people setting up a UK-based entity just to claim tax credit despite no R&D work was actually performed in the UK.
Consequently, from 1 April 2021, the government will introduce a cap, limiting the payable R&D tax credit to three times the total PAYE and NIC liability of the company for the year, plus £20,000. This also means that the first £20,000 of repayable tax credit claim will be exempt from the cap, thereby protecting smaller SMEs with few employees.
For a genuine SME that employs people to carry out R&D work in the UK, the new changes will have little or no impact. However, for a company that doesn’t have any real UK-based activities, or one that doesn’t employ people but relies on subcontractors, the new rule will discourage them from making an R&D tax credit claim.
Exemption
The new changes will not apply to companies that:
- Have employees creating, preparing to create, or managing Intellectual Property (IP), and;
- Do not spend more than 15% of its qualifying R&D expenditure on subcontracting R&D to, or the provision of externally provided workers (EPWs) by, connected persons.
R&D and IP creation
Ideally, R&D work would lead to IP creation, and if this is the case, your company could also take advantage of the Patent Box – a scheme that allows companies to apply a lower rate of Corporate Tax to profits earned from its patented inventions.
‘Related party PAYE’
In calculating PAYE and NIC liabilities, claimants may include related third parties, i.e. those companies performing R&D activities on the claimants behalf, as long as the work is directly attributable to the development activity.
Talk to TaxAgility
The first step is to seek professional guidance on this issue if you aren’t sure how it is going to impact your business.