Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a particular case of Technical Debt (TD) where developers explicitly acknowledge their sub-optimal implementation decisions. Though previous studies have demonstrated that SATD is common in software projects and negatively impacts their maintenance, they have mostly approached software systems coded in traditional object-oriented programming (OOP), such as Java, C++ or .NET. This paper studies SATD in R packages, and reports results of a three-part study. The first part mined more than 500 R packages available on GitHub, and manually analysed more than 164k of comments to generate a dataset. The second part administered a crowd-sourcing to analyse the quality of the extracted comments, while the third part conducted a survey to address developers’ perspectives regarding SATD comments. The main findings indicate that a large amount of outdated code is left commented, with SATD accounting for about 3% of comments. Code Debt was the most common type, but there were also traces of Algorithm Debt, and there is a considerable amount of comments dedicated to circumventing CRAN checks. Moreover, package authors seldom address the SATD they encounter and often add it as self-reminders.