R&D claims

[bigweb]

We want to submit an R&D claim. I have a project if not more than 1 which should qualify.

There are loads of companies who help you with this for a rather large fee.

Our accountants don't directly do it they refer it out.

Has anyone done their own?

I don't really want to pay a huge fee if it's not necessary

[MaxFromage]

bigweb said:

We want to submit an R&D claim. I have a project if not more than 1 which should qualify.

There are loads of companies who help you with this for a rather large fee.

Our accountants don't directly do it they refer it out.

Has anyone done their own?

I don't really want to pay a huge fee if it's not necessary

I'm afraid you don't have the skills to do your own. There's a reason why plenty of accountants recommend third parties to do it rather than doing them in-house. A good one will have direct access to HMRC and can pre-authorise the claim if there are any grey areas.

Many will quote 15-25% of the saving as their fee, but you can get much lower without sacrificing quality.

[StevieBee]

As Max says, it's not something you can easily do yourself - well, you can but you need to invest considerable time to it and there's many hoops to navigate.

But be careful!

HMRC run a policy of "Pay now - check later". So you could submit an application and get the rebate within a few weeks but 18 months later they come back and say sorry, we want that money back. I know this because it happened to me which was a contributing factor to the demise of the company I was running at the time.

We had gone through a third-party company who were highly recommended to us. They never explained the possibility of this and nor was there any mention in their gumff. They did agree to refund us their fee but only after we had paid back the rebate which we were not able to do.

So whoever you go with, ask them directly what their policy is regarding claw-back by HMRC.

[andyb28]

StevieBee said:

As Max says, it's not something you can easily do yourself - well, you can but you need to invest considerable time to it and there's many hoops to navigate.

But be careful!

HMRC run a policy of "Pay now - check later". So you could submit an application and get the rebate within a few weeks but 18 months later they come back and say sorry, we want that money back. I know this because it happened to me which was a contributing factor to the demise of the company I was running at the time.

We had gone through a third-party company who were highly recommended to us. They never explained the possibility of this and nor was there any mention in their gumff. They did agree to refund us their fee but only after we had paid back the rebate which we were not able to do.

So whoever you go with, ask them directly what their policy is regarding claw-back by HMRC.

Wise words here!
We have completed claims for years and never had a problem. However we also pay our consultants quite a bit. They are one of the original companies in this space with a lot of experience. They write our technical report for us which goes into a lot of detail.

They did advise us this year that HMRC are looking a lot more closely at this and there has also been a lot of fraud.

[Scrump]

My employer use a specialist company to help with their claim. Having had a couple of entries queried by the HMRC, they dealt with the HMRC much better than I could have when we had a couple of entries queried.