Are You Under-Claiming? Seven Signals

Under-claiming is quiet. There's no error message, no bounced lodgement, just a refund that's smaller than it should have been. If a few of these sound familiar, it's worth a closer look.

1. Your claim is the same size every year

R&D changes shape year to year. A claim that never moves usually means someone is copying last year's scope rather than reviewing what actually happened.

2. You only counted the engineers

Product, design, technical management and the people supporting experiments can all contribute eligible time. A wages line that only captures a couple of developers is often the first sign of a narrow claim.

3. Contractors and materials were left out

Eligible expenditure isn't just salaries. Contractors doing R&D work and materials consumed in experiments frequently get dropped because they sit in a different part of the ledger.

4. "We weren't sure it qualified", so you didn't ask

The boundary between eligible and ineligible is genuinely subtle. Uncertainty is not a reason to exclude an activity; it's a reason to have a specialist scope it.

5. Nobody kept contemporaneous records

If your evidence was reconstructed at lodgement time, you likely claimed what you could prove easily, not what you were actually entitled to.

6. Your accountant is brilliant, but R&DTI isn't their specialty

This is not a failure. R&DTI is a specialist field with its own legislation and definitions. Specialist results come from specialist attention.

7. You've never had a second opinion

The simplest signal of all. If nobody has independently reviewed the claim, you have no benchmark for whether it's complete.

The good news: every one of these is fixable, and prior years can often be revisited. The five-minute SmartyPants Simple Diagnostic tells you whether it's worth a proper look.