From the 2026 budget audit
An office that covers 82% of its costs from user fees gets held flat, not expanded.
The NKFI Office recovers about 82% of its operating cost from fees paid by companies and researchers using its certification services — a near-fee-funded body that should not grow by default.
Roughly 790 Ft per full-time taxpayer per year — 1,733.4 millió Ft total — for the office's materials, IT, utilities and services, net of 5,981 millió Ft in fee income the office raises from its own users.
What you see — and what you don't
The seen: routine operating costs for an office that issues R&D tax certificates and research-organisation accreditations — services companies pay for because they want the certificates. The unseen: the net general-revenue call that falls on every other taxpayer is kept modest precisely because the users of the services already reveal their demand through the fees they pay.
Objection
"If the office already covers 82% of its costs through fees, there's no real problem here."
Answer
There is no crisis — which is why the recommendation is a freeze, not a cut. But an office that recovers 82% of its costs from user fees is closer to a fee-funded agency than to a pure public good, and real-terms erosion under a nominal freeze is the honest discipline for a body whose scale should track the users who actually pay for its services.
Share if you think a near-fee-funded office should be sized by demand, not by administrative default.
The analyst's verdict
NKFI Office — Operating expenditures
Rationale
Materials, utilities, IT, services and the recurring operating cost of running the office. It tracks the office's scale; with the office held to a nominal freeze, its operating budget carries the same treatment. The administrative cost of separately litigating an operating-budget cut would exceed the saving, and the bounded nature of the function does not justify expansion.
Transition mechanism
Hold at 1,733.4 millió Ft nominal; real-terms erosion enforces efficiency discipline.
Affected groups
Suppliers of routine office goods and services; the effect is gradual real-terms compression, not termination.
Free Society Institute
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