As I discussed in the previous post, these processes need to be extremely lightweight, because most companies are in the “business” business, which is to say, manufacturing, or computer programming, or tool and die work, etc., or whatever business they happen to be in. SR&ED is supposed to help by mitigating the costs of technical risk, by supporting the development of new and improved products and services, and by providing a financial incentive for the pursuit of new knowledge, experimentally.
The initial efforts to develop a SR&ED Framework, and the necessary supporting processes, may mean that the SR&ED program strives first for effectiveness and then secondarily, for efficiency. SR&ED process thinking entails a paring down of anything that isn’t the minimum required effort to achieve that desired effectiveness, because your effectiveness depends on the full cooperation of others who do not, in all likelihood, share your concerns. They have other jobs to do – technical, financial, etc – and what you are asking of them will require cooperation and effective “buy in” to justify what will be, at the very least, an unusual demand on their time. Keeping things lightweight, and trimming down the level of interruption or extra effort, where you can, is critical for the success of your framework and processes.
Ask yourself, what would be the easiest way to do this?
Well, the easiest way to do SR&ED is where the technical experts in a company understand what is eligible, and they identify that eligible work instantly, as it arises. Having identified eligible SR&ED work, the technical experts do the necessary technical work and they keep sufficient documentation (of both the work and the costs) so that the work can be claimed with minimal effort. From a program level, that means that the ownership and direction of the science part should be led by the technical experts in a company. The financial and operational parts – such as scope of effort, costs, contractual eligibility, and claim preparation – may be a combined effort of a project management office and SR&ED Program Management office, while the tax filing will be led by Finance and Taxation teams. Moreover, these processes, which sound as though they are designed for big corporations (true) are also scalable down to small companies. If you think of the SR&ED process as a relay race, the difference between the large and small process is the number of “handoffs” between individual roles, and the effort to be sure that nobody “drops the baton” while you’re trying to make the finish line.
If there was to be a fourth process required, it should be the process for ensuring that you have understood and extracted the necessary learning – about the technical work, and about the SR&ED process itself. This would be the process for circling back, and looking at lessons learned, and the part of the process where you start re-examining the Framework (your spider web) to see which bits you can improve, going forward.
That would be, thinking about SR&ED and …