It has been another busy year for our spokespeople with a huge range of thought leadership and reactive commentary.
Njy Rios kicked off our commentary on current events in March with a reaction to the Spring Statement in which she argued that the Government was kicking the can down the road and that we needed more concrete changes. These comments were also covered across a range of the media, including Process Engineering, UKTN, Information Age, Business Leader and SME Magazine.
In July, the team also looked closely at the UK’s Finance Bill, and Mark Smith drafted a response to the reform to R&D tax relief. The response is generally supportive of the legislation, especially for expanding the qualifying expenditure to include activity relating to data, cloud, and pure mathematics. The team’s engagement with the Finance Bill continued throughout the year, contributing thoughts to the call for evidence, which was also published on the Ayming website in November.
However, the team were also worried about a potential problem with the UK’s R&D tax credit scheme. Ben Craig published an article explaining that large businesses were on track to lose funding due to the upcoming increase in corporation tax in an attempt to draw attention to the issue. This piece was also published in Bloomberg Tax as part of a wider analysis of R&D tax credit reform.
Building on this thought leadership on the UK’s R&D, the UK team drafted a whitepaper entitled R&D Tax 101. This was a guide to the UK’s R&D tax credit scheme and aimed to show businesses that they are likely entitled to more funding than they expected. This guidance was complemented in October by Craig’s piece outlining the pros and cons of R&D Tax calculators, which are often used to give businesses estimates on their claims.
More globally, we launched the 5th version of the Benchmark in September, which provides R&D and finance teams with a comprehensive guide to compare R&D incentive schemes across the globe. This year’s version was our biggest yet and analysed 23 countries according to Generosity of the Scheme and Ease of Application.
The Benchmark was followed by this year’s other major piece of innovation content across Ayming Group – the International Innovation Barometer. Once again, this year’s report took the research up a notch, with 846 respondents across 15 counties including three new countries. This year’s third section focused on the energy crisis and the impact this was having on businesses.
At the start of September, HMRC released its annual R&D spending statistics, part of which caught our team’s attention. Smith wrote an article explaining that the real headline of these statistics was buried towards the end of the report. The ONS now claimed that they had been underestimating R&D spending by as much as 60%. This suddenly boosted the UK’s R&D spending and has allowed the Government to hit its 2.7% of GDP target. This was also published by Tax Journal.
Finally, in response to the UK’s Autumn Budget in November, our R&D experts gave their view on the key points and what they mean for UK innovation.
More to follow in 2023!
Notes to Editors
Ayming is a leading international Business Performance consultancy and has a global footprint. The Group is present in 15 countries: Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, the UK and USA with a staff of approximately 1,300.
In the UK, Ayming helps businesses to improve their financial and operational performance through innovation, tax, and HR performance.
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