R&D Audit and Litigation Support
What you need to know
In today's R&D incentive environment you should expect to be audited by the ATO and AusIndustry at some point. Believe it or not, audits can (sometimes) be a wonderful thing. A successful audit outcome provides certainty and confidence that your R&D claim is appropriate.
Most auditors try to be fair and reasonable, but sometimes legislative interpretation differences do arise. Clearly, it's best to avoid escalation or litigation.
Thread is here to help. As a qualified lawyer with 27 years' R&D audit experience and having submitted thousands of R&D project applications (with a near perfect track record) you have come to the right place!
ATO and AusIndustry auditors will usually look for the following:
- Contemporaneous documentation to back up your R&D technical claims and experiments
- Contemporaneous documentation to back up your R&D expenditure calculations
- Documentation to support other eligibility threshold items such as:
- Corporate structure
- Aggregated turnover
- Salary and wage allocations
- Contract payments
- Nexus to profit and loss expenses and overheads
- For whom the R&D is conducted
- Overseas expenditure
- Nexus to other direct expenditure
Key Success Factors
- Maintain contemporaneous records
- Respond politely to requests from the regulators
- Clearly link your R&D activities to your R&D expenditures
- Don't be generic in your technical papers or group activities into one big project
- Always go back to the R&D legislative provisions
- Be patient, but hold your ground, sometimes the technical aspects of your projects may be difficult to comprehend