Investment Ministry Scraps Call for Research into Digital Transformation

Bratislava, July 17 (TASR) - The Investment, Regional Development and Informatisation Ministry has halted a call aimed at supporting research and development in the field of Slovakia's digital transformation, the ministry announced on Thursday. The reason given for this was serious implementation risks in the original set-up, which could have led to a fatal failure and jeopardised the drawing of money from the Recovery and Resilience Plan of the Slovak Republic. "More than half of the 247 submitted applications didn't meet even the basic conditions for providing money or were assessed as being of low quality. Expert evaluations and subsequent verification of the conditions of state aid revealed systematic errors, such as incorrect determination of the size category of enterprises and, in particular, incorrect categorisation of research activities. At the same time, it turned out that some foreign expert evaluators had a problem orientating themselves in the specifics of the domestic environment, which was reflected in inappropriate decisions," the ministry explained. The ministry further stated that up to 90 percent of the supported projects were assigned to research categories that didn't correspond to their actual focus. According to the ministry, this has a significant impact on the intensity of state aid. The difference between industrial and experimental research should be as high as 25 percent, which in practice means a decrease in eligible expenditures by tens to hundreds of thousands of euros per project. In many cases, such incorrectly set conditions would make it impossible for applicants to secure co-financing, which would lead to mass refusals to sign contracts. According to the ministry, this situation was unsustainable. If contracts were signed in their original form, it would put reaching the milestone in the Slovak Recovery and Resilience Plan in serious jeopardy, and there would also be a risk of losing money from the European Commission. Therefore, the ministry decided to halt the call. ko/df