Richard Edwards highlights the human cost of HMRC tightening access to R&D tax relief.
Over the past 18 months, much has been written about HMRC’s tough new approach to compliance within R&D tax relief. Although, at this point, it’s only ‘new’ in the context of the past two decades, in which HMRC generally seemed content to assume that the scheme was ticking along just fine and that claimants and their advisors could be trusted to stick to the letter and spirit of the programme.
As we all know now with hindsight, the problems within R&D tax relief went deep. Things were emphatically not fine. A worrying number of claims were clearly wide of the mark – some of which ended up featured in the national press. The pressure on HMRC to act spiked, and this led directly to where we are today – with the FIS, WMBC, ISBC, SOLS and ADR teams all involved to trying to rein in, chastise or negotiate with claimants and advisors.
Unfortunately, while most advisors would agree that ‘something needed to be done’, those same advisors would probably also agree that HMRC’s recent interventions are having serious and presumably unintended consequences on both claimants and their advisors. Some of these changes could have a significant impact on who will be using the R&D scheme in the future.
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