IN his Budget 2016 statement, Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat said that a targeted approach to supporting businesses will be the preferred way going forward. At the same time, Mr Heng also announced that the broad-based Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) scheme will be discontinued after the year of assessment 2018.

Rightly or wrongly, there may be a perception on the ground that a broad-based approach costs large sums of money and could be prone to abuse. Some have also claimed that productivity has not really improved despite the heavy investments in PIC.

Use of broad-based schemes like PIC