As an accountant, you are used to making sure that your clients are benefiting from their finances by giving them high-quality advice and guidance.
This might lead you to want to extend your services to helping them with R&D tax relief claims.
While it is good for accountants to offer this as a service, we would encourage accountants to seek support from a trusted R&D tax consultant.
From issues with compliance, enquiry defence and missing out on funds, R&D tax consultants can help you get the most out of R&D tax relief claims for your clients.
When might an accountant need support with an R&D tax relief claim?
The notion of R&D for tax purposes carries with it a very specific definition that can be misunderstood by those less familiar with the scheme.
This will not be helped by discussions with innovative businesses, where they may fail to fully appreciate the scope of the R&D work that they conduct.
For a competent professional, the person who should be leading the charge with the R&D work, some of the challenges that they tackle might feel like a part of their daily work, but still qualify for an R&D tax relief claim.
As such, having professionals who are more familiar with the intricacies of the R&D tax relief claims can enable your innovative clients to understand what work they do should be considered for the claim.
Conversely, we are also aware of a tendency to accidentally include aspects of work that should not be considered for an R&D tax relief claim.
In some industries, the line between routine improvements and innovation can be quite fine and we are adept at knowing where to draw that line so claims are maximised while staying fully compliant.
What might accountants miss in an R&D tax relief claim?
The R&D tax relief scheme is often misunderstood as something that is relatively perfunctory and thus not worth engaging with fully.
However, there is a range of qualifying expenditure that is worth including in an R&D tax relief claim.
This can include the costs of consumables that were irrevocably changed or destroyed as part of the R&D work and cannot be sold on for commercial gain.
We can also help you to identify the employee expenses based on the extent to which they engaged with R&D and when certain activities undertaken by staff need to be left out of the claim.
There may even be entire projects that are missed out of R&D tax relief claims if a client mentions it in passing and the accountant does not know to drill deeper into the specifics.
What are the other risks that accountants may face?
It is no secret that HMRC have been working to make R&D tax relief claims more challenging to submit.
This has resulted in more claims being subject to enquiries than ever before and many of these enquiries can occur at random.
For accountants who are not intimately familiar with R&D tax relief claims, the prospect of battling an HMRC enquiry might be too intimidating.
This means that even perfectly valid claims could be lost and innovative businesses may miss out on vital funds unfairly.
We offer robust enquiry defence support to ensure that a compliant claim will result in a business receiving the funds it deserves.
We know that accountants can offer R&D tax relief support as their services, but we would strongly recommend that they also seek the advice and support of expert R&D tax consultants.
If you want to discover how best to support your clients as they seek to resolve scientific and technological uncertainties, then we can give you tailored advice to help you.
R&D tax reliefs are a great asset for innovation, but only when they are approached in a sensible way.
