Research and development (R&D) projects have been paused during the COVID-19 crisis alongside other business activities. However, the employer may still incur costs such as the top-up of wages for furloughed staff, and more recently employer’s NI and pension contributions for those employees.

HMRC has now clarified which costs relating to furloughed staff can be considered to be directly related to the R&D project, and thus can form part of an R&D tax relief claim.

The good news is that holiday pay and sick pay paid to employees who normally work on R&D projects may be counted as relevant costs, even if that holiday or sick leave is taken while the R&D project is paused. The bad news is that redundancy costs, and payments in lieu of notice (PILON) can never be treated as relevant R&D expenditure.

Where the employee has been fully furloughed, none of the employment costs can be allocated to the R&D project, as the employee won’t have worked during that period. Where employee has been flexi-furloughed from 1 July onwards the cost of their time spent working can be treated as qualifying R&D costs, but not the costs associated with furloughed hours.

For any part of the employment costs to be allocated to the R&D project, the particular employee has to be directly involved in the R&D activities. It is not permissible to include in the R&D claim a proportion of costs of a wider pool of employees who are not involved at all in the R&D project.

It is also essential to correctly identify the R&D project using the guidelines on the meaning of R&D, and to accurately record the costs that directly relate to the project.

A number of specialist firms will approach companies asserting that they can get a tax refund for the company on the basis that R&D is carried out. The specialist adviser will take a significant proportion of the tax saved as their fee, and in some cases continue to charge a fee for some years after the R&D project has finished.

If your client is approached by such a specialist R&D adviser, tell them about the AHK Recruitment Ltd case. A claim was submitted on behalf of the company but when challenged by HMRC the company couldn’t produce any evidence to support that claim. The case report doesn’t mention penalties for an incorrect return, but they were certainly applied.