alt Hacker NewsMy experience is different, so far I've defended R&D that I believed to be eligible to tax credits, in order for companies to be competitive with other countries that also subsidize R&D and innovation, namely USA and Canada. You can't generalize a 7 billion tax cut system based on one journalist work (the same and the same is quoted again...), opinions based on a few rotten fruits in the basket, and an anti-startup trend that amplifies this hatred for political and ideological reasons.
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It's not only the tech startups, I've mentioned it because that's what a know best, but my brother works for a large industrial company, and they use the same tricks and also have their reports done by professional bullshit companies whose jobs is to make it look like some research happened (in their case it's sometimes somewhat the case - unlike tech startups - but most of it is just bullshit).
My experience, from 20 years as well, aligns with widespread abuses. Pretty much the whole financial sector is sponsored by the CIR, none of which contribute anything beyond the bullshit reports mentioned above. I myself wrote countless reports like that, most of them vastly autogenerated to look pompous.
I don't remember having to defend anything to get the CIR, it's more of a judgment call on whether you feel confident to defend it if you get an audit, and these are very rare. We've had such audit in the past, and it made everyone rewrite each submitted report in a hurry to make them look more serious. No sanction were applied.
At this point, my opinion is that the CIR has very little to do with actual research, but rather it's a discretionary tax subsidy for sectors in which France wants to be competitive.