What happens to your incentives if the business fails

Türkiye pays Decision 10962 support in cash, into the company account, against spending you have already made. The question of what happens to that money if the business later closes tends to arrive when a liquidation is already under way.

Closing a company does not oblige you to repay support. Repayment comes from a claim that should not have been paid, and that debt can outlive the company by several years.

Closing the company is not the trigger

The support carries no minimum operating period. It is assessed on qualifying spending already made, filed within the six-month window, and paid once approved. Nothing in that structure asks you to keep trading afterwards.

A company that claimed correctly and then wound up has nothing to hand back. What stops is future claiming. Five-year runs on items such as agent commissions end where the company ends. Applications that were filed but never paid fall away with the entity that filed them, which matters if you begin a liquidation with money still in the pipeline.

That covers most closures.

What triggers repayment

Article 47 of the Decision handles sanctions. It reaches support found to have been received excessively, unduly or unjustly, or to have been used outside its purpose. Recovery begins on notification from the Ministry.

None of those four describes a company that stopped trading. They describe a claim that should not have been paid at the amount it was paid, or at all. That covers a cost which was never eligible in the first place, and spending put through a personal card and presented as the company's.

Article 47 also suspends you. Where the breach is found before any payment has been made, spending and activities in the six months following notification of the sanction are not supported. Where a payment has already gone out, it is treated as an improper payment and the exclusion runs for a year from notification. So a defective claim costs more than the claim itself: it closes the programme for a period while your competitors carry on using it.

A third sanction catches companies which did nothing wrong themselves. Where the issuer of an invoice used in an application is found to have produced false or misleading documents, no service bought from that issuer can be supported for ten years.

What Law 6183 means once it is running

Article 47 does not create a collection process of its own. It hands the debt to Law No. 6183 on the Procedure for Collection of Public Receivables, and the relevant tax offices collect it.

Law 6183 is the machinery Türkiye uses for unpaid tax and unpaid social security. A debt inside it is pursued by a tax office holding a tax office's powers, rather than by a ministry bringing a civil action and arguing about it for three years.

Two numbers follow from that.

A late payment surcharge accrues at 3.7% a month. Presidential Decision No. 10556 set that rate on 13 November 2025, reduced from the 4.5% that applied before. Across a year it comes to a little over 44%, so a repayment established three years after the event is substantially larger than the sum originally paid out.

Collection is time-barred after five years under Article 102, counted from the start of the year following the year the receivable fell due. The limit governs the collection of a debt that already exists, which is narrower than a guarantee that no finding will be made in year four.

Striking the company off is what exposes you

A company that has completed liquidation and been removed from the trade registry has no legal personality. It cannot be assessed and it cannot be pursued, and Turkish courts have held that proceedings brought against a company that no longer exists are void.

The debt does not end with it. Under repeated Article 35 of Law 6183, public debts that cannot be collected from a legal entity are collected from the personal assets of its legal representatives. Inability to collect from the company is the condition that opens that route, and a company struck off the registry satisfies that condition completely.

The sequence runs: the company is dissolved, the company can no longer be assessed, and the assessment is directed instead at the people who represented it during the period concerned.

Who those people are depends on the form you chose.

• Shareholders of a limited company are directly liable under Article 35 for public debts that cannot be collected from the company, in proportion to their capital share. No fault is required, and no involvement in management. A passive holder of 25% is exposed to 25%.
• Shareholders of a joint stock company carry no equivalent liability for the company's public debts.
• Legal representatives of both forms are reachable under repeated Article 35, jointly and severally for the whole amount rather than in proportion. In a joint stock company that means board members or executives holding representation authority. A limited company must have at least one manager, and that manager is in scope.

What this adds to the company form decision

We have written before about choosing between a limited and a joint stock company, where the arguments concern who can be chased for unpaid tax, what happens when you sell, and whether you plan to raise. This is the same shareholder liability point, seen from the end of the company's life.

For a company drawing money from a government programme, the gap between a form that exposes passive shareholders and one that does not is worth more than the extra cost of setting up the second.

The practical part

Do not begin a liquidation with claims outstanding. An application that has been filed but not paid dies with the entity, so the order of events deserves settling before anything goes to the registry.

Keep the claim file after the company is gone. The evidence that a claim was sound stays useful for years after there is no company holding it, and the person who will need it is you. Invoices, payment records, export documentation and correspondence with the Ministry belong somewhere durable and personal, not on a company drive that gets switched off during the wind-up.

The exposure follows the quality of the claims, not the fate of the business. A studio that closes after two well documented years sits in a different position from one that closes after two loose ones, and the difference between them was fixed at the point of claiming.

For the version of this that applies while the business is still running, why claims get rejected covers the four causes behind most of them, and the payment trail rules cover the defect we see most often.