Research Tax Credit

Posted by Pierre-Edouard Guerin · 4 min read · Published on October 7, 2025

The Research Activities Tax Credit is a tax credit that incentivizes private companies to increase their Research and Development (R&D). Within my company, I have been tasked with writing the Research Tax Credit (CIR) justification report for France. Here, the method for writing such a report.

Plan

List of R&D operations
Identity card of operation
Context and Objectives of operation
Research Indicators
Object of the operation
Scientific, technical or technological contribution
Description of the method & results
Human resources
Scientific partnership
List of documents related to the operation

Instructions

1. List of R&D operations

Presentation of our R&D work must be decomposed into operations. An operation is part of a project. The operation can be part of more than one single project and reciprocally a project may consist of several operations.

The operation aims to answer a scientific question. Its purpose is about solving a bottleneck. For the current year, you list all operations by project in a recapitulative table with the following columns:

Name of the operation
Year
Span
Contact person
Class of the operation
- secret defense, confidential, restricted
Field
- A4c – Bioinformatique : inférence et analyse de séquences/réseaux, stockage et fouille, modélisation et simulation
Cost
Short summary
- Sentence 1: context
- Sentence 2-3: identified bottleneck and objectives
- Sentence 4-5: Completed objectives and results
Research Indicator:
- Scientific publications and communications
- Collaboration with academia such as thesis, CIFRE contract and project (FUI, ANR, etc)
- Patents

2. Identity card

Short description of the operation:

Name of the operation
Year
Planned start and end
Number of worked hours
Field
- A4c – Bioinformatique : inférence et analyse de séquences/réseaux, stockage et fouille, modélisation et simulation

3. Context and Objectives of the operation

Introduction: industrial and scientific context.
Prerequisites to understand the bottleneck.
Description of the technical bottleneck. Why do we initiate a work to solve it?
Planned objectives to solve this bottleneck.

4. Research Indicators

Scientific publications and communications
Collaboration with academia such as thesis, CIFRE contract and project (FUI, ANR, etc)
Patents

5. Object of the operation

5.1. State of the art, Initial situation

Complete description of the context in which occurs the bottleneck.
Complete description of the bottleneck and the state of the scientific community and knowledge about it.
Complete description of the current state of the company and partners with regard to this bottleneck.
Use scientific sources

5.2. Bottlenecks

List of bottlenecks from section 3.3.

Complete description of the the technical problems that we must solve.
Justify that the problem is not already solved in the literature.
Use scientific sources

5.3. References

Cite sources in the text whenever you refers to a scientific article, ideas, or words. The citation format depends on the chosen style (APA, MLA, Chicago, or Vancouver).

6. Scientific, technical or technological contribution

Describe the knowledge or how-to produced by the operation. Precise the delivered innovation in regard to the state of the art. Demonstrate why the produced materials are innovative.

6.1. Results

Answer for each bottlenecks in section 5.2.:

What does the result?
What is innovative in it?

6.2. Bilan

Summary of all bottlenecks and their provided solutions.

7. Description of the method & results

Description of the method for each results listed in sections 6.1. and 6.2.
- Initial work hypothesis
- Used tools and softwares
- Materials such as figures and table to demonstrate the technicity of your method
Discussion of the results
- Show the reproductibility of the results
- Analysis and conclusion of each result
Gantt diagram
- Show the chronology of the works
- Pluriannual planning of the project

8. Human resources

List involved persons in the operation
Justify case of low percent (0-10%) of participation of the person
Justify case of high percent (90-100%) of participation of the person

9. Scientific partnership

List of partnerships and contractors involved in the operation
- process of selection of the partner or contractor
- description of the contribution
For each partnership:
- Object of the sub-operation
- Scientific, technical or technological contribution
- Description of the method & results
Which works are funded by the Research Tax Credit and which works are not funded.

Documents that justify research indicators:
- Scientific publications and communications
- Collaboration with academia such as thesis, CIFRE contract and project (FUI, ANR, etc)
- Patents
Supplementary materials and figures related to the description of the method & results

References

How to write a CIR report file for the french governement: enseignementsup-recherche.gouv

Published on October 7, 2025

Relevant Tags

communication

About the Author

Pierre-Edouard Guerin

Bioinformatician