In the fall of 2014, the Ontario government announced a review of the Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit. During this process, Interactive Ontario took part in numerous meetings with the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport; the Ministry of Finance, the Treasury Board and the Premier’s Office. We were pleased with the outcome in the next provincial budget, with the OIDTMC rate left unchanged and guidelines changed to reduce “outliers” accessing the credit for products outside of its intended use.
Concerns remained around some of the new guidelines, so Interactive Ontario continued to collaborate with the government on issues such as:
- Promoting changes to filing deadlines in order to reduce the queue and improve cash flow predictability for IDM companies
- Promoting changes to regulations that would allow for collaboration between companies
- Ensuring a fair transition period to new 80/25 labour expenditure guidelines so as not to punish companies who had structured projects to match the previous 90% rule
- Clarifying the “standalone” product definition and raising concerns that it unintentionally punished work-for-hire products hosted on broadcaster websites