[slantyyz]

My opinion of SRED is mostly negative based on some experience (albeit out of date, from the late 90s and early 00s) and talking to people I know who were trying to get SRED money.

In one instance, a company I worked for hired a consultant to do the application. This consultant basically interviewed everyone on the technical team and tried to coax us into saying every piece of functionality was novel and innovative, whether it was true or not. I came out of that meeting feeling so dirty that I wanted to shower for a couple of hours.

My other experiences were working in companies (or knowing of other people in other companies) who were applying for and getting SRED money where the R&D innovations were at best questionable.

As someone who works in tech, I want programs like SRED to work. On the other hand, being a taxpayer and seeing how some companies are getting SRED money for arguably undeserving R&D work makes me think SRED is a complete waste of taxpayer money.

[developer1]

Every technology company I have worked for claims and receives the SRED. None of them have deserved it - not even remotely close. Each of my companies have made millions in profit each year. We have never done anything innovative that required actual research or risking anything by developing new technologies. My teams have used linux, mysql, memcached, redis, and a couple of programming languages. 100% of the work is just writing normal code for web applications. How much of that $4 billion dollars being handed out is for fraudulent claims of R&D? I would bet more than $3 billion. There are supposed requirements to meet to be eligible for the benefit, but everyday programming work is being rephrased to sound innovative and difficult.

This benefit needs to be abolished, as the number of tax dollars being sunk into it is ridiculous. For the few percent of businesses that might actual merit such a benefit, oh well. Compete in the market like everyone else without assistance. The difference between a deserving business and a business that will lie and twist words to save 15-35% on salaries is impossible to determine accurately. Too many liars and fraudsters have destroyed the system, so kill the program and nobody benefits.

[wwhchung]

Would love to have access to anonymized SR&ED claims data. I'll also bet that while 75% of the claimant's are small businesses, they only get < 10% of the $4B (remind you of anything)?

It's why I advocate for a lower hard cap as well. With a hard cap, it's likely that the total amount paid out is well under $4B, which means we can then go on and address how we can better distribute funding and change the evaluation process to not be as restrictive.