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Democratising the Tax Lease: how the tax advantage is widened.

As written, the law rewards above all those who already start well. This page explains the lever with which the advantage reaches the others too: the percentage the law returns is not touched; what changes is how much certified expense it applies to. With a control to see it for yourself.

4 min read

To read this page: the Tax Lease and the AIE · the tax investment simulation.

The lever

Democratising the Tax Lease: how the tax advantage is widened.

As it is written, the law rewards above all whoever already starts well: of the forty tax combinations that exist, only ten recover more than they contribute, and all ten are Canary. The other thirty fall below, and the lowest stops at 31%. Here we explain what we do so that the others get there too.

Let us start with what cannot be changed. For every euro of certified expenditure attributed to you, the law returns a fixed percentage: the rate you stop paying by putting that expenditure into your base, plus the R&D and technological innovation deduction. That percentage depends on where you are taxed and on what kind of expenditure it is, and it runs from 31% to 126.1%. Nobody can touch it, neither we nor you.

What can be moved is how much certified expenditure is attributed to you. The project does not live inside your pocket: it lives inside an AIE, a company created solely to fund that research. You contribute capital to that company, but the money the AIE can spend is not only yours: it also receives a loan from the startup that will exploit the result. With that money it commissions more research, and all that expenditure is certified.

And here is the point. As a partner in the AIE, the certified expenditure is attributed to you in proportion to your stake, not in proportion to what you paid in. If the AIE spends twice what you put in, twice the expenditure is attributed to you. Your percentage under the law has not changed by a single point: what has changed is what it is applied to. The slice is the same; the cake is bigger.

That is why this is not a trick for those who were already on top: it is, above all, for those who were at the bottom. Move the control and you will see how many tax combinations go from falling short to recovering more than they put in.

What each tax combination recovers, on €100 put in

The straight line joins the two extremes and does not describe what lies between: the forty combinations concentrate between 60% and 100%, and at the worst point a straight line departs by 13.8 points from the real value. That is why the big percentage is not read off the drawing: it is counted one by one over the forty values. They come from crossing the twelve Canary income tax bands and the six mainland ones with the two kinds of expenditure, plus the four for companies, which are taxed at a flat rate. The dashed line is the net return: the surplus over your capital is taxed as financial income, and here the 30% for individuals is applied, which is the least favourable case.

The private capital that comes in alongside yours is not a gift: it arrives as a subordinated loan from the startup to the AIE, and the project repays it. The deduction is capped at a percentage of your tax liability, 90% in the Canary Islands and 50% on the mainland: if your liability is small, the cap arrives before the lever does. And above ×1.20 it is best to stop, as the simulator below will warn you.

Your numbers

Now, with your data.

The lever is the same in the simulation: when you raise your credit target above your natural level, the expense the AIE executes grows with the private capital that enters, and your percentage applies to more. The concrete numbers of your profile, your residence and your amount, in the simulator.

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy, 1962
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