5 Things to consider when choosing your R&D Tax Credits partner

PCRT guidance in relation to R&D Tax Credits

On June 1^st 2020, any business offering tax advice was brought under the scope of the new 'Professional Conduct in Relation to Taxation' (PCRT) guidance. R&D Tax credit advice is tax advice and any member of one of the PCRT bodies (AAT, ATT, ACCA, CIOT, ICAS, STEP) together with businesses offering R&D Tax Credit advice must now follow the PCRT guidance.

The guidance sets out five fundamental principles that members of these professional bodies together with any business offering tax advice must adhere to: integrity, objectivity, professional competence and due care, confidentiality and professional behaviour. You may note that CAI is not a signatory to PCRT; however HMRC accepted this several years ago on the basis that CAI’s Code of Ethics and Professional Standards already sufficiently cover these principles. Two of Momentum’s Chartered Accountants are members of CAI and have been consistently applying these principles when preparing claims for our clients. In addition a further member of the team is a member of ICAS ensuring our Chartered Accountants are fully compliant.

These principles are central to all of our processes when preparing R&D claims and always have been. Your claim, as with all our claims will receive the ultimate professional service as characterised as follows under the five fundamental principles:

Integrity – We are honest in all our professional and business relationships.

Objectivity – We do not allow bias, conflict of interest or undue influence of others to override our professional nor business judgements.

Professional competence and due care – We maintain the professional knowledge and skill at the level required to ensure that a client receives competent professional advice based on current developments in practice, legislation and act diligently and in accordance with applicable technical and professional standards.

Confidentiality – We respect the confidentiality of information acquired as a result of professional and business relationships and, therefore, will not disclose any such information to third parties without proper and specific authority to do so.

Professional behaviour – We comply with relevant laws and regulations and avoid any action that discredits the profession or Momentum.

While many other R&D businesses are still catching up on bringing their processes in line with PCRT; Momentum’s focus is to continue to prepare robust and qualifying claims, maximising qualifying costs where our processes allow us to do so. Using the wrong adviser can be costly, contact us today for a free consultation. We are specialist R&D tax credit consultants.