[jobigoud]

I can confirm. At my previous job we were about 20 employees and we had one person dedicated to this. Grants for R&D, so her work was to make the paperwork explaining and documenting why it was R&D. Also there was another gov help to pay half the salary of employees for which it was the first job after their thesis or something along these lines.

[908B64B197]

Wow. The inefficiency of having to dedicate an employees to that paperwork (and probably the same manpower on the government side to receive it and take action) make it sounds like a welfare/job program.

Would be way more efficient to simply drop the tax rate and make these 2 positions redundant, freeing more money for actual R&D.

The post-thesis bit is interesting: How is it the taxpayer's job to finance that? I get funding the thesis themselves but why should a company get funding for hiring someone who completed one? Shouldn't the thesis make the employee more valuable thus negating the need for this welfare?

[jobigoud]

Also she was conducting "interviews" with us to assess better what was and what wasn't R&D in our tasks, so once in a while we would spend an hour not doing any productive work.

Yes post-thesis are more valuable, including to other countries. I think it is an incentive to the employer so they can increase the compensation in order to limit brain drain.