Australian Medical/Biotech ‘Patent Box’ Tax Legislation Revealed

On 10 February 2022, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Concession for Australian Medical Innovations) Bill 2022 was introduced to the Australian parliament, and received its first and second readings in the House of Representatives.  The Bill represents the fulfilment of an undertaking in the Federal Government’s 2021 budget to introduce a ‘patent box’ scheme to encourage innovation and commercialisation in the Australian medical and biotechnology sectors.  A ‘patent box’ (the name refers either to an actual box on a form, or to a notional box into which a company allocates a proportion of its income) is a tax incentive scheme under which income that can be directly attributed to the commercialisation of patented technology (as distinct from other attributes, such as branding, know-how, or manufacturing capability) is taxed at a reduced rate. 

Under the scheme established by the legislation, the minimum concessional tax rate is 17%, compared with the normal corporate tax rate of 30% for large companies, or 25% for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).  However, the full benefit of the scheme is only available to the extent that R&D leading to development of a patented invention is conducted in Australia.

As the government had indicated in its original budget announcement, only medical and biotechnology inventions will be eligible for the patent box tax concession.  In particular, a patent will be eligible if it is ‘linked’ to a therapeutic good included on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (ARTG).  This means that a product, which is covered wholly or in part by the claims of the patent, must be a therapeutic good (e.g. a pharmaceutical substance or medical device) that requires, and has received, marketing approval in Australia.

Interestingly, however, the patent relied upon as the basis for eligibility under the patent box scheme need not be an Australian patent.  A patent will qualify under the scheme if it is an Australian standard patent (i.e. innovation patents are not eligible), a US utility patent, or a European patent granted under the European Patent Convention (EPC). 

It was initially proposed that only patents having a priority date after the announcement would qualify.  However, in further positive news, according to the Bill patents granted or issued after the date of the budget announcement (11 May 2021) will be eligible.

It is intended that the patent box concession will commence in the coming financial year, i.e. from 1 July 2022.  However, for this to happen the legislation will need to be passed in both houses of parliament before federal election is called.  It is widely anticipated that this will occur in early to mid April, shortly after the government hands down its budget on 29 March 2022.  With no further sitting days scheduled prior to budget week, it could become a race against time to get the legislation through.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Legislation, Patent box, Tax incentives

‘Patent Box’ Update – the Devil is in the Details When it Comes to Dates

I previously reported on the Australian government’s budget announcement that it will be introducing a so-called ‘patent box’ tax incentive for medical and biotech (and, possibly, clean energy) innovations.  Implementation details of the scheme are yet to be worked out, and the government is promising to consult closely with industry on the design of the patent box.  However, while the final form of the scheme – which will not come into effect until 1 July 2022 – may not be known for many months, there is already at least one critical issue that prospective users of the system may need to consider.

The government’s fact sheet on ‘tax incentives to support the recovery’ states that ‘…granted patents, which were applied for after the Budget announcement, will be eligible’.  There is, as yet, no clear indication of what the government means by ‘applied for’, however in its ‘What’s New’ email (to which you can subscribe here), sent on 14 May 2021, IP Australia states that ‘[t]o be eligible, the patent must have a priority date after 11 May 2021…’.  Being unable to find this detail in the budget papers, I sent out a tweet asking whether anybody else had seen it, and tagging @IPAustralia, which responded:

Hi Mark, thanks for your comment. This is our understanding of the announcement. Further details on the patent box will be released in the coming weeks by Treasury as part of the public consultation.

— IP Australia (@IPAustralia) May 14, 2021

There is a big difference between ‘priority date’ and ‘filing date’, which hopefully will be open for discussion during the public consultation.  If the critical date is the priority date, then this means that Australian medical and biotech innovators who have already filed a priority application (e.g. a provisional application) prior to the budget announcement would not be eligible for the patent box tax incentive if they subsequently file a complete application claiming the benefit of the provisional filing date.  On the other hand, if they were now to file the same complete application in Australia without a priority claim, then they would be eligible for the scheme upon grant of any resulting patent.

The risk of dropping a valid claim to priority, of course, is there there may be intervening prior art that could invalidate or limit the scope of the claims, which has been made public after the priority date, but before the subsequent complete filing date.  To minimise this risk, the complete application should be filed as soon as possible. 

Fortunately, the Australian grace period protects an applicant against their own disclosures during the 12 months prior to the complete filing date.  Furthermore, the discovery of intervening prior art would not be fatal, at least up until grant of the patent (see regulation 10.2B(7) of the Patents Regulations 1991), since the patent request could be amended to include the priority claim, with the consequence that the patent box incentive would then be unavailable.

The choice to file in Australia without claiming priority would not affect the applicant’s right to claim priority in other jurisdiction, either through direct applications or via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

But, frankly, this seems perverse.  To my mind, the logical choice for the critical date is the filing date of the complete patent application, which commences the patent term of up to 20 years during which the patent box tax incentive could be claimed.  Basing eligibility on the priority date will simply encourage strategies, such as I have outlined above, to engineer eligibility.  This does not serve anybody’s interests.  The government will not make significant savings on the operation of the patent box scheme, while applicants will feel compelled to adapt their patent filing strategies simply to comply with an arbitrary choice of eligibility criteria.

Hopefully, through the consultation process, common sense will prevail.  In the meantime, however, medical and biotech innovators with pending priority applications should probably seek advice from their patent attorneys.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives

Australian Government Announces a (Sort of) ‘Patent Box’ Tax Incentive

This week, the Australian government handed down its annual budget.  At the risk of sounding overly cynical, I am always sceptical about how many of the policy measures announced in the budget will actually come to fruition, given that their funding is often dependent on hazy forecasts of future economic performance, and their implementation may span many years during which future budgets – and potentially new governments – may come and go, bringing their own priorities and revised forecasts.  But even I cannot help sitting up and taking notice when patents get a mention, with all of the ensuing media coverage that brings during the budget frenzy!

So the ‘big news’ is that the government is going to introduce a ‘patent box’ tax incentive scheme in Australia… sort of.  If you are not already familiar with the concept, a ‘patent box’ – the name refers either to an actual box on a form, or to a notional box into which a company allocates a proportion of its income – is a tax incentive scheme under which income that can be directly attributed to the commercialisation of patented technology (as distinct from other attributes, such as branding, know-how, or manufacturing capability) is taxed at a reduced rate.  Other income continues to be taxed at the standard corporate rate.

The Australian patent box scheme is actually going to be somewhat limited, initially applying only to medical and biotech patents, with the possibility that it might also be made available to the clean energy sector.  The incentive will only be available on income generated from patents applied for after the budget announcement (i.e. pre-existing patents and application will not be eligible).  And it will not come into effect until 1 July 2022.  The tax rate on eligible income will be 17%, compared with the normal corporate tax rate of 30% for large companies, or 25% for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).  This discounted rate is higher than other countries that operate a patent box system, e.g. France 15%, Spain 12%, UK 10%, Belgium 6.8%, Luxembourg 5.84%, and Netherlands 5%.  Even taking into account that a number of these countries have a lower corporate tax rate than Australia, equal or larger discounts are also available elsewhere, e.g., in France (where the corporate tax rate is 32.02%), Spain (25%), Belgium (25%), and Luxembourg (24.94%).

So – true to form – the Australian patent box will be a very ‘middle-of-the-road’ affair, with limited eligibility, and relatively modest tax discounts, especially for SMEs that are already subject to a lower tax rate than larger corporates.  As it so often does, the government has decided to limit its exposure by picking winners – this time, medical and biotechnology industries – leaving other sectors (such as IT, where Australian companies such as Atlassian, Canva, Afterpay, Judo Bank, Zip Co, and AirWallex have been punching well above their weight) to fend for themselves.  Or, more likely, to move their R&D activities overseas, into more favourable jurisdictions.

On the other hand, the announcement is something of a turnaround for this government, considering that criticism among G20 finance ministers in 2014, and a 2015 review commissioned by the Office of the Chief Economist in the Department of Industry delivered negative conclusions that seemed to have killed off any prospect a patent box scheme being introduced in Australia.

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Tags: Australia, Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives

Australian Government Consultation on Changes to the R&D Tax Incentive Program

On 8 May 2018, the Australian Government announced its plans to reform the Research and Development Tax Incentive (R&DTI) program to better target the program and improve its integrity and fiscal affordability in response to the recommendations of the 2016 Review of the R&D Tax Incentive (‘the Review’).  Changes to the program will apply for income years starting on or after 1 July 2018, i.e. the current financial year just beginning.  On 29 June 2018, the government released exposure draft legislation and associated explanatory materials setting out its proposed implementation of the reforms.  It is currently seeking stakeholder feedback on these materials, and has published an accompanying consultation paper outlining areas in which specific feedback on the implementation of the reforms is being requested.

The R&DTI is the Australian Government’s largest, and most costly, innovation incentive program.  In its current form, it provides a tax offset (of 43.5% or 38.5%, depending on annual aggregated turnover) for some of a company's cost of eligible R&D activities.  To be eligible, an applicant must be an incorporated company, and be conducting eligible core R&D activities incurring an expenditure of at least A$20,000.  The legislation defines eligible activities as being experiments that are guided by hypotheses and conducted for the purpose of generating new knowledge.

The Review found that the R&DTI was failing to fully achieve its objectives of generating additional R&D activities and was not well targeted, in the sense that it provides benefits for R&D activities that would have been undertaken anyway.  It also found the cost of the Incentive had exceeded its initial estimates of A$1.8 billion per annum when it was introduced in 2011-12.  In 2016-17, it actually cost around A$3 billion.  The Review made a number of recommendations to improve the integrity and effectiveness of the program and to promote its objectives.  The proposed legislation would implement a number of these recommendations, adopted in the 2018-19 national budget.

If passed, the proposed changes to the R&DTI program will apply a A$4 million cap to the refund available to small companies (although, notably, clinical trials will be exempt from the cap).  They will also reduce the incentive available to large companies, and make the corresponding tax offset dependent upon R&D intensity (i.e. cost of R&D relative to total expenditure).  Additionally, they will close some ‘loopholes’ and make a number of adjustments to the administration of the program, including enhancing transparency by requiring information about companies’ R&D tax claims to be published.

A consultation process in currently underway, with submissions due by 26 July 2018.

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Tags: Legislation, Public consultation, Tax incentives

Australian Patent Performance is the Victim of a Vortex of Negativity, and Education (Alone) is Not the Solution

In my previous article, I wrote about low patent-filing rates by Australian innovators, and lamented that this is the continuation of the country’s long history of giving intellectual property away for free.  And while occasionally this has been done intentionally, with good (if misguided) intentions, more often it is the result of a failure, through ignorance or inadvertence, to recognise and protect IP where suitable forms of protection are, in fact, available.  I speculated that there may be some fairly persistent cultural biases that keep IP protection generally, and patents in particular, off the radar of many Australian innovators, and I suggested that lifting Australians’ use of the patent system may require little more than some effort at self-education, and a change in mindset.

Thinking about this further, however, I have realised that it is mindset-change that represents the real challenge here.  There already exist many resources to assist Australian innovators in improving their IP awareness and knowledge.  IP Australia provides a range of educational materials, including videos published via its YouTube channel, and (in a very welcome change from its reticence just a few years ago) is active on both Facebook and Twitter.  It also does a lot of outreach and educational work through email lists, seminars/webinars and other events.  Another major source of information is the Australian IP profession – patent attorneys, trade marks attorneys, and IP lawyers.  Most patent attorneys, for example, do not charge for initial consultations, and between phone enquiries and initial meetings often provide over an hour of free education and general advice before a potential client makes a decision on whether to proceed or not.  And for every such enquiry that leads to paid work, there may be half-a-dozen or more that go nowhere.  IP Australia’s recently-developed ‘Engaging an Attorney Toolkit’ is yet another good educational resource, which assists innovators in getting the most out of their initial contact with a patent attorney.

However, there is nothing new about the availability of many of these types of educational materials.  Furthermore, while they have been growing in number and quality over recent years, there has been – as the charts in my previous article show – absolutely no real growth in the numbers of patents being filed by Australians, in Australia and elsewhere, over this period.  Just today, I attended IP Australia’s first ever IP Summit, ‘Launch to Export’, where rooms of interested members of the public heard about various aspects of IP protection, government assistance programs, and the experiences of successful entrepreneurs.  My guess, however, is that this event will also have no impact on patent filings.

What I realised, as I looked around the room, is that all of these educational events, efforts and materials have one thing in common – the people who engage with them have already made the decision that they need to find out more about IP.  The information may now be more readily-available, and of higher quality, than in the past, but what has not changed is that the subset of innovators and entrepreneurs actually motivated to seek IP knowledge has not fundamentally changed.  Unlike the schooling of children, neither the government, nor anybody else, has the power to make IP education compulsory!  Nor is it a question of leading the horse to water in the hope that it may decide to drink – the horse has refused the bridle, cantered across the paddock, jumped the fence, and decided to forego all aqueous opportunities in favour of pursuing its own interests elsewhere!

So the educational content is available, but we need to get Australian innovators and entrepreneurs to want to consume it.  To make that happen, we are going to have to figure out why there is so little interest in IP in general, and patents in particular.  I maintain that this is largely a cultural issue, and I hypothesise here that there is a reinforcing feedback system operating, that I will call the ‘vortex of negativity’!  To drag the mindset of Australians caught in this vortex back into the light, where they can evaluate the potential value of patenting their innovation with clear and unbiased vision (and I am not, of course, suggesting that patents are always the right choice), I suggest that we may need to appeal to their basest economic instincts, by providing clear financial incentives or rewards to businesses that patent their new technology.  And I have a few modest proposals as to how this might be done!

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Tags: Government programs, Innovation, Innovation policy, Tax incentives

‘Patent Box’ Tax Break Prospects Plummet at G20 Meeting

The Australian Government looks set to abandon the sole IP-related initiative it took into last year’s federal election, with treasurer Joe Hockey reportedly all but ruling out the prospect of a ‘patent box’ tax concession being introduced in this country.

Indeed, according to coverage of this weekend’s G20 Summit taking place in Brisbane, Hockey is also pushing for other countries that currently have patent box schemes to amend their own rules to ‘ensure that they are not inappropriately used for tax avoidance’.

I think this is all very unfortunate, particularly because much of the anti-patent-box sentiment appears to be based upon gross misunderstandings (or, possibly, wilful disingenuousness) about what patent box schemes are about, and how they work.  Even the economics editor at The Age newspaper, Peter Martin, seems to be spreading the misinformation, writing that ‘patent boxes allow companies that have developed new technology overseas to register the patent in the host country in order to avoid tax in the country in which the technology was developed.’ 

However, as I explained in an earlier article, patent box schemes are designed to encourage investment in R&D within the jurisdiction where patented technology is developed, by offering a reduced tax rate on profits that can be specifically attributed to that technology.  This is not tax ‘avoidance’.  It is a tax concession that is offered on income that might not have been generated at all – or that might have been generated in another country – were it not for the incentive provided by the scheme.  Pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline credited the introduction of a patent box concession in the UK for its decision to build its first new factory there in 40 years, and to follow up with a further 200 million pound investment in 2013.

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Tags: Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives

Australian Government Looking Into the ‘Patent Box’

Australia’s assistant treasurer, Arthur Sinodinos, has confirmed that the government will be looking into the possibility of introducing so-called ‘patent box’ tax breaks.

I have written about patent box schemes before (incidentally, the name comes from the box provided on tax forms for companies to claim the benefit).  Such programs, which provide reduced tax rates (typically between 5% and 15%) on income attributable to patented IP, have been introduced in a number of countries, including the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Ireland, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland and China.

In the United States the Manufacturing Innovation in America Act of 2013 (HR 2605), which would provide for a patent box tax reduction, was introduced in the House of Representatives on 28 June 2013, and is currently before a congressional committee.  (I note, however, that GovTrack.us gives the legislation only a 1% chance of getting past committee, and a 0% chance of being enacted!)

Potential patent box rules will be proposed by AusBiotech and the Export Council of Australia, and will considered as part of a planned government review of research and development later this year.

I am pleased to see that a review that includes consideration of a patent box scheme will be going ahead, and I am hopeful that it will report favourably on the proposal.  I am in favour of a patent box tax reduction in Australia for two reasons:

1. I believe that it provides the right incentive for commercial innovation, by rewarding not only investment in R&D (as existing grant and tax relief programs do), but more specifically R&D which results in protectable intellectual property which is then actually protected and successfully commercialised; and
2. with a number of other developed economies providing patent box tax incentives, Australia places itself at a competitive disadvantage as a location for conducting research, development and manufacturing if it does not do likewise.

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Tags: Government programs, Innovation policy, Public policy, Tax incentives