The Ultimate Tech Startup Guide to SR&ED Claim Reviews

You filed your corporate taxes, submitted your T661 forms, and instead of a refund check, you received a letter from the CRA stating your claim has been selected for review.

Panic often ensues, but a review is a standard part of the program. Here is the lifecycle of a technical review and how to navigate it.

1. The Initial Information Request

The auditor (often a Research and Technology Advisor, or RTA) will begin by requesting specific documentation. They will not ask for everything; they will ask for a representative sample to understand your processes.

• They will ask for timesheets covering specific developers for specific weeks.
• They will ask for architecture diagrams, Jira boards, or code commit summaries related to specific projects detailed in your narrative.

The Golden Rule: Provide exactly what they ask for, organized logically, and nothing more. Do not dump your entire GitHub repository on the auditor. Answer the specific question asked.

2. The Site Visit / Technical Interview

Once the RTA has reviewed the requested documents, they will typically schedule a meeting (in-person or virtual).

During this meeting, the RTA will want to speak directly to the technical lead who performed the work—not the CEO, and not the accountant. The RTA is an engineer themselves, and they want to have a peer-to-peer technical conversation about the engineering hurdles.

Preparation is Key: Your technical lead should review the submitted narratives and the contemporaneous documentation before the meeting. They must be prepared to articulate the technological uncertainty clearly and differentiate between the routine engineering and the experimental failures.

3. The Preliminary Report

After the interview, the RTA will draft a preliminary report detailing their findings. They will conclude one of the following:

• All projects and expenses are accepted.
• Some projects are accepted, some are denied.
• Projects are accepted, but specific expenses (like subjective percentage allocations on timesheets) are reduced.
• All projects are denied.

4. The Rebuttal Phase

If the RTA proposes adjustments or denials, you do not have to accept them immediately. You generally have 30 days to provide additional information, clarify technical misunderstandings, or formally rebut their findings in writing.

This is the most critical phase. If the RTA misunderstood the technical uncertainty because your initial narrative was poor, this is your chance to provide the specific, granular technical diagrams and code snippets that prove the limitation of the existing knowledge baseline.

5. The Final Decision

Following the rebuttal review, the CRA will issue a final decision and process the adjusted Notice of Assessment (NOA), releasing whatever funds have been approved.

A review is not a trial; it is a collaborative (though formal) process of verifying eligibility. With strong, contemporaneous documentation and technically articulate leads, reviews are usually resolved smoothly.