In the last 2 years there have been some massive changes to R&D Tax Relief. One of them has a looming deadline for around 30% (I’m guessing, but it’s an educated guess) of businesses that might be considering a claim.

If your company had a financial year end of 31 March 2024, and you haven’t claimed R&D Tax Relief before or you haven’t submitted a claim between 1^st October 2021 and 30^th September 2024, then you will need to notify HMRC of your intention to claim, by 30^th September 2024.

If you don’t your claim won’t be accepted. It’s also not a fixed deadline as it will be relevant for every month going forward so a 30th April 2024 year end will need to pre-notify by 30th October 2024 a 31st December 2024 year end by 30^th June 2025.

If you think you might be considering a claim, then you really need to make sure you have pre-notified HMRC by 30^th September if you are a company with a March year end.

The rules are further complicated by disallowing a claim made on an amended tax return (a second filing) to include an R&D Claim that was submitted in the period between 1^st April 2023 and 30^th September 2024. So, if you filed an amend claim for 31^st March 2022 after 1^st April 2023 and you haven’t yet submitted your 31^st March 2023 claim or you submitted it after 1^st April 2024, you will need to pre-notify HMRC.

Confused? We were!

Whether they have complicated the rules to catch people out we don’t know, but they are complicated.

Not sure where to start? Well you can try here, but it doesn’t reference the disallowing of amended R&D Claims, so if you’re still not sure or if you don’t have access to your online tax account, why not send us an e-mail or give us a call and we can help you with that. You don’t even have to use us for your R&D claim.

We’ll have a quick chat about your projects, we’ll need a bit of information about the business, some dates and names and reference numbers and we’ll prepare and submit your notification form.

There’ll be a small fee! £350!

You may subsequently decide not to prepare a claim, or you might ask us to prepare a claim and in our more detailed look at your projects, we might say there isn’t scope for a claim as your projects don’t meet the requirements, or there isn’t sufficient cost to make it viable for either of us.

If you do go on to use our full R&D Tax Relief service, we’ll discount our final fee to remove the cost of the original notification.

That’s fair isn’t it?