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Comment by flipp3r | Hacker News Reader

This. I can see the Netherlands on 2+% of GDP on the chart as well. The Netherlands indeed grants tax cuts if you do R&D (The law is called "WBSO"), however it totally depends on how you word what you're doing towards the tax authorities. Installing Kubernetes & building Jenkins pipelines? Sorry, that's obviously NOT R&D. Oh wait -- someone hired a company to word it slightly differently. Now you're getting an X million tax cut.

Source: Worked at a company that got a 10M+ tax cut for moving to Microservices & rewriting a fucking frontend in React.

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I work for a company mainly based in The Netherlands that gets a ~$400 million USD/yr tax cut through WBSO. Search for "Innoation Box" here: http://ir.bookingholdings.com/node/23191/html

It's definitely a huge benefit, but as far as I know this doesn't subtract from government budgets for basic research in The Netherlands (but maybe I'm wrong).

It's basically a tax benefit the government uses as an incentive to get more knowledge workers into the country and to stimulate that sort of economic activity in general.

Those knowledge workers can also get a flat 30% tax reduction which is applied to their gross wage before other reductions. The end result is that someone earning 100k EUR a year has a net take home pay of 101k EUR.

Source: the tax returns of someone I know who took advantage of this scheme (I could have, only I found out about it too late).

Indeed, but this is unrelated to whether or not their employer participates in "research" via WBSO or any other schema, it's more like the U.S. H1B program, i.e. they've got to try to search for talent domestically (or at least make a show of it), not find it, and then pay above a certain amount for the job.

The rules are much stricter these days and it’s not indefinite. When I left it was 5 years with a possible 5 year extension.

There’s also a lot of luck in the application process. I had colleagues in identical jobs, similar salaries who didn’t get the 30% ruling when I did.

Yeah. I was in the same situation a couple of times: As a tech guy being asked to review the WBSO request drafted by some supposed subsidy expert, who was hired for a couple of days and for good money. These requests always contained utter gibberish. If I could bring some sense into it, but by using as much complex technical jargon and expensive words in it as possible. Otherwise they might conclude that most of it was not R&D. Rubbish. Did it twice, trying to be as honest as possible in the circumstance, but from then on always pressed my moustache (is that an expression in English? I made myself unavailable) when these things did the round again.

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