The judges believe that companies can take into account in their research tax credit base subcontracted work that does not constitute, in isolation, research operations eligible for the research tax credit.
Companies that carry out certain research operations can benefit from a tax credit for this, the famous research tax credit (CIR). Remember that the amount of this tax benefit is 30% of eligible expenses, this rate being lowered to 5% for research expenses incurred above 100 M €. Knowing that companies are not required to perform all of the research internally. They can benefit from the CIR even if they subcontract part of the research operations to public or similar research organizations or to private research organizations approved by the Minister in charge of Research, or to scientific experts. or techniques approved under the same conditions. Note: expenditure subcontracted to public bodies can be retained by the ordering company for double their amount: – if there is no arm’s length relationship between the latter and the subcontractor; – and only for the part of the research operations carried out directly by these organizations. As for expenses entrusted to approved private bodies, they are only retained within the limit of three times the total amount of other research expenses giving rise to the right to the tax credit. However, outsourced expenses are capped at € 2 million per year, this ceiling being raised to € 10 million in the absence of a dependency relationship between the ordering company and the subcontracting organization, or even to € 12 million. if the outsourcing takes place with a public research organization or similar. As such, while the tax administration requires that the outsourced expenditure constitute by nature real research operations eligible for the CIR, the Council of State has just softened this position.
It has thus come to the conclusion that the contracting companies can take into account subcontracted services in their CIR base, even if these, taken in isolation, do not constitute research operations. Note: in this case, the subcontracted work consisted of analytical studies and impact tests that the contracting company could not carry out itself because it did not have the necessary equipment and tools. The State Council noted in particular that the subcontracted work fell within the scientific framework of the projects carried out by the contracting company and that they were necessary for the realization of these same projects.