FIBC Tax Credit Applicants: Producer Control

For Film Incentive BC (“FIBC”) applications, the “producer” of a film or video production is defined in the Income Tax Act – Film and Television Tax Credit Regulations as:

the individual who

(a) controls and is the central decision maker in respect of the production,

(b) is directly responsible for the acquisition of the production, story or screenplay and the development, creative and financial control and exploitation of the production, and

(c) is identified in the production as being the producer of the production;

The “producer” of an FIBC project must be a BC producer. To be considered a BC producer, the individual must be a Canadian citizen or permanent resident of Canada who is subject to tax in BC on December 31 of the year before principal photography starts on the production.

All producer and producer-related roles on the project will be reviewed in order to determine who the “producer” on the project is, as defined by the Regulations. This may include Executive Producers or other producer-related personnel.

Granting Executive Producer or other producer-related credits to non-BC individuals is acceptable, as long as it is clear that those individuals are not performing the roles and responsibilities of the producer, as described above.

Granting producer or co-producer credits to non-BC individuals will disqualify the production if it is not an interprovincial or a treaty co-production.

If it is unclear during an application review as to who the producer is that fits the definition of the regulations, the analyst will reach out to the application contact directly for clarification.

For interprovincial and/or treaty co-productions, as defined in the Regulations (“interprovincial co-production” and “treaty co-production”), non-BC producer and co-producer credits are acceptable as long as their work is for the non-BC production corporation, and there is a BC producer / co-producer credit of the same level for work done by the BC production corporation.

Supporting documents are listed in the FIBC Eligibility & Completion application checklists available on our website at www.creativebc.com/fibc.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to Creative BC with questions about meeting the Producer requirements for your FIBC projects.

Lea Chambers
Senior Business Analyst, Motion Picture Tax Credits
lchambers(at)creativebc.com

This post is intended as a general overview. It is not exhaustive and should not be relied upon to determine eligibility or the final amount of an anticipated tax credit. In case of any discrepancies between this post and the Income Tax Act (BC) and Regulations (the “Act”), the provisions of the Act prevail.