What 60+ HMRC Enquiries Have Taught Us About Good R&D Claims

Somewhere along the way of dealing and working on HMRC enquiries, patterns start to repeat themselves. Not in the projects, which are all genuinely different, but in what separates the claims that come through an enquiry intact from the ones that don't.

I want to share some of what that experience has actually taught us, because I think it's more useful than another generic list of what a compliant claim should contain.

It's Rarely About the Innovation Itself

In our experience, the issue is rarely simply whether the work looked innovative or technically complex and challenging. The harder question is whether the claim demonstrates the required advance and technological or scientific uncertainties against the relevant qualifying criteria. HMRC isn't usually disputing that something difficult happened. What gets questioned is whether the claim actually demonstrates it properly.

The weakest claims we've seen tend to share the same handful of problems. A narrative that describes the finished product instead of the uncertainty behind it. Evidence that exists but isn't explained or contextualised. A disconnect between what the technical narrative says happened and what the financial schedule actually claims for. None of these are really about the underlying work being weak. They're about the claim failing to show what the work actually involved.

The Strongest Claims Share a Different Pattern

The claims that come through enquiry with the least friction tend to have one thing in common: nothing in them needed to be invented after the fact. The evidence was already there because the business documented its own work properly, and the technical narrative was built from that evidence rather than around it.

It also helps enormously when a genuine competent professional was involved early, not brought in at the last minute to sign something off. Their input tends to be the difference between a narrative that reads convincingly and one that actually holds up when someone starts asking pointed questions about it.

What This Has Changed About How We Work

Every enquiry we've supported has fed back into how we build claims from the very beginning, not just how we respond when HMRC writes. It's part of why we assess eligibility properly before anything is prepared, and why our technical and financial teams work from the same evidence rather than two separate processes stitched together at the end.

I'd rather learn these lessons from experience and build them into our process than let a client find out the hard way what a weak claim looks like when it's actually tested.

Get in touchif you want to talk through what we've learned in more detail. I'm always happy to.