CBI  Survey shows less than 10% of businesses fully satisfied with costs of claiming R&D tax relief

4th February 2009

The CBI today published the results of its long-awaited R&D Tax Credit Survey today.  While the survey attracted 70 responses from companies with over £5bn of R&D expenditure and the comments from R&D performers  showed a marked improvement over the first survey published in 2005, one clear result of the survey was that more than 40% of companies said that the cost of preparing a claim was either unsatisfactory or unacceptable.

Astonishingly, less than 10% of businesses were fully satisfied with the cost of making the claim.

While companies are now increasingly confident about their ability to claim R&D Tax Relief on an annual basis with 90% planning to continue claiming there are clearly still concerns in some areas, particularly in the cost of making a claim and in terms of whether work qualifies. Satisfaction with HMRC and the way they handle claims has also increased, which can be attributed to the setup of the regional specialist R&D units and their efforts at ensuring a consistent claims handling process.

Our view is that making an R&D tax credit claim is a valuable business benefit that does not have to incur huge expenditure even for the largest organisations.

Professional services expenditure can be reduced by utilising existing tax staff who are quite capable of calculating R&D costs, while the technical aspects of qualifying the R&D claim can be carried out by either your in-house technical staff or by ad hoc consultancy.

Micah Levy

http://research-and-development-tax-credits.com