nanalLabs Blog"You need to keep a lab notebook" — companies running a certified corporate research institute (기업부설연구소) in Korea hear this just like university labs do. But the legal basis, and what an audit actually asks for, are different from government-funded R&D projects.
A different legal basis — tax law, not the National R&D Innovation Act
For government-funded projects, lab notebooks are governed by the National R&D Innovation Act and its decrees. For corporate research institutes, the notebook is required mostly as evidence for the R&D tax credit: Article 9 of the Enforcement Decree of the Special Tax Treatment Control Act requires anyone claiming the credit to prepare and retain R&D plans, R&D reports and research notes as supporting documents. In other words, the corporate lab notebook is not a research-ethics artifact — it is proof that the company qualifies for a tax deduction. Because the legal basis differs, the required form differs too; copying a government-project template can leave out exactly what a tax audit asks for. Always check the current text on the government legislation portal — the decree is amended often.
What to record, and how
The commonly cited principles:
- Separate notebooks per project (or per researcher/department) — do not mix projects.
- Author and date on every entry — who wrote it, and when, is the core evidence.
- Describe progress and experiments in free prose — concrete narrative beats rigid forms.
- Record failures and abandoned attempts too — "no result" is part of the research; omitting it hurts credibility.
- Write so a third party could reproduce the work — methods, conditions, numbers.
These principles appear consistently in consulting and electronic-lab-notebook guidance, but they are not spelled out clause-by-clause in the statute. Before relying on them, confirm with your tax office or an accounting firm experienced in R&D tax credits.
Retention and pre-review — too late once you're audited
Supporting documents must be retained for five years from the end of the tax year in which the credit was taken. In a tax audit, the notebook is the primary evidence that the claimed spending really was research; a missing or thin notebook can mean repaying the credit — with penalty tax.
To reduce that risk, the National Tax Service has run a pre-review system for the R&D tax credit since 2020: apply before filing and the NTS confirms eligibility in advance. The catch is that the R&D plan, report and notebook must already be in presentable shape at application time. A notebook you plan to "tidy up later" is already too late.
Self-check list
- [ ] Are notebooks separated by project and researcher?
- [ ] Does every entry carry an author and a date?
- [ ] Are failed and abandoned experiments recorded?
- [ ] Are methods and conditions concrete enough for a third party to reproduce?
- [ ] Do the notebook, the R&D plan and the R&D report tell one consistent story?
- [ ] Can the writing date be confirmed by something outside the record itself?
- [ ] Is there a five-year retention plan — including notebooks of departed staff?
The last two are the ones most often missing. A handwritten date proves nothing about when it was written, and a cloud document without an edit history cannot answer "was this rewritten later?" Whether you can support the writing date from outside the record is what separates a notebook that survives an audit from one that doesn't.