MCN offers a comprehensive and proactive approach to organizing SR&ED-related activities and claiming SR&ED tax credits. As a part of our standard SR&ED service, our team will be happy to meet with your organization throughout the year to help them understand more about the SR&ED program and optimize their processes and procedures to ensure that each SR&ED-eligible activity is properly identified, documented and reflected in your SR&ED claim.

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Here are some areas where SR&ED education plays a vital role:

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• Empowering Employees – Empowering employees can lead to significant increases in SR&ED claims. One technique we employ to make this happen is our SR&ED seminars.These are 45-minute to 1-hour sessions where our team presents the objectives, benefits and basic criteria of the SR&ED program to your employees. Employees often feel more empowered when they understand the requirements of the program and how the program benefits your company. This is turn makes employees receptive to keeping notes, logs or other bits of information that can help during the SR&ED technical interviews. Another great benefit of having these SR&ED education sessions is that these sessions often lead to the discovery of SR&ED-eligible work that tends to be overlooked by employees and can lead to gaps in your claim.
• Audit Proofing – In rare cases when a SR&ED claim gets reviewed by the CRA, MCN consultants will always attend the CRA review. However, often the CRA reviewers will want to interview your personnel and probe their understanding of the SR&ED eligibility criteria. This is because the program is self-assessed. The CRA wants to know that your staff understands the program to ensure that the submitted work, along with the allocated time/costs, is eligible. The more you can say to demonstrate your understanding of the SR&ED program, the more comfortable the CRA reviewers will feel. Your understanding of the SR&ED program reduces the chance of material error in your SR&ED claim (the reviewer’s major concern) and ensures the successful approval of the claim.
• Business Process Optimization – The SR&ED program requires that documentation to substantiate the claim be captured. This documentation may include contracts, email communication, source code/prototypes, time dockets, pictures etc. When employees and management learn more about the SR&ED program and appreciate the importance and financial implications of keeping the house in order, it becomes much easier to implement adjustments to business processes and procedures to capture SR&ED supporting documentation. Having employees on board makes it easier to adjust development approaches and manufacturing processes to ensure that the necessary SR&ED-relevant information is captured in real-time thereby greatly reducing the cost of compliance with the SR&ED program.