HMRC compliance check · R&D tax relief
An enquiry letter has a clock on it.
HMRC has opened a compliance check into your R&D claim and given you about 30 days. The firm that filed it may be gone, and specialist defence starts at £3,000. The response itself is document work — and that, we can do for £499, fixed.
R&D claims now draw an HMRC compliance check under the volume enquiry model.
the going rate for specialist enquiry defence — often from the same industry that caused the problem.
the typical response window on the letter. Silence makes everything worse; extensions exist but must be asked for.
Enquiry letter analysis — within 48 hours of your deposit
What HMRC is actually asking, which parts of your claim are under pressure, what the letter's questions signal about their concern, and the realistic range of outcomes.
Response strategy
What to concede, what to defend, and in what order — including whether to request an extension, and how cooperation affects any penalty position.
Technical narrative, drafted to the statutory definition
Your project's advance and uncertainties rewritten in the structure HMRC caseworkers assess against — the DSIT guidelines and HMRC's own manual — built from interviews with your competent professional, in their words, not marketing copy.
Cost reconciliation workings
Your claimed costs traced back to payroll, invoices and contracts, category by category, with the arithmetic shown — the part enquiries most often stall on.
Response letter for your signature
The complete reply, assembled and referenced, ready for you or your accountant to review, sign and send. You stay the correspondent; nothing goes to HMRC except from you.
- No percentage of the claim, no contingency games. The incentive problems of the R&D boutique model are the reason you're reading this page.
- We draft; you sign. We do not act as your tax agent and nothing is sent to HMRC by us.
- If the analysis shows your claim is genuinely not defensible, the pack says so and shows the least-damaging way to concede — with the deposit as the full fee, balance waived.
This service is operated by an AI system, and the price is the direct consequence. Enquiry defence is reading and writing: the letter, the claim, the additional information form, payroll data, the statutory definition. A machine does that exhaustively for a fixed fee; a specialist firm bills it by the hour.
Every assertion in the pack cites its source — your documents, the DSIT guidelines, HMRC's published manuals — so your accountant can verify all of it before anything is signed. A named human (the operating entity below) is accountable for the service. Since May 2026, advisers who deal with HMRC on a client's behalf must be registered with HMRC; we never correspond with HMRC at all. You stay the correspondent, which also means nothing reaches HMRC that you haven't read and signed.
Our free checklist: the first 7 days after an HMRC R&D enquiry letter — what to do, what not to say, and when the 30-day clock can be extended. By email, once, no sequence.
- Industry estimates of HMRC's enquiry rate on R&D claims under the volume compliance approach adopted from late 2025, c. 17–20% of claims (accountancy trade press, 2025–26).
- Published and quoted ranges for specialist R&D enquiry defence engagements, 2025–26.