HMRC doesn't ask if the work happened. It asks if you can prove it happened when you say it did.
Since August 2023, HMRC requires an Additional Information Form declaring when each project began, ended and who led it. Reports written retrospectively from memory or AI output do not satisfy the test. The first criminal prosecution landed in 2025.
AIF mandatory since 1 August 2023. Every R&D claim must now be accompanied by a structured Additional Information Form, submitted before the claim is processed. Claims without an AIF are rejected. Penalty for careless claims: up to 30% of tax understated. For deliberate behaviour: up to 100%, with a 20-year discovery window.
“Contemporaneous” is not a preference. It is the statutory concept.
Eight instruments across UK, US and international law. Every one of them asks the same question: can you prove this evidence was created at the time you say it was?
Mandatory since 8 August 2023 for every R&D claim. The AIF requires, per project: the field of science or technology and the advance being sought; the scientific or technological uncertainties identified; how and when those uncertainties were overcome, and by whom; and what work was done and when. A retrospective narrative answering those four questions fails the form's purpose. HMRC's guidance is explicit that contemporaneous evidence of a project taking place is what it expects, not retrospective explanations from a competent professional.
HMRC's guidance on competent professional evidence and record-keeping states the expected records are: project charts, drawings, designs, test results, photos of prototypes, minutes of meetings, email exchanges. It adds: keep a written copy of the competent professional's opinion with supporting reasoning; it is good practice to keep relevant records from the beginning of the project. Invoices and bank statements appear nowhere in that primary list. They are assumed to exist for the expenditure test. They do not exist for the qualifying-activity test.
The offence of failure to prevent facilitation of UK tax evasion imposes strict corporate liability on any firm whose associated persons criminally facilitate tax evasion. The defence is that the organisation had reasonable prevention procedures in place. Conviction does not require proof of director-level intent. The firm must be able to evidence those procedures, training records, supervision notes, claim review sign-offs; and that evidence must itself be contemporaneous. Bennett Verby Ltd is the first corporate prosecution under these provisions. Trial September 2027, Manchester Crown Court.
Every R&D claim involves two separate evidentiary tests HMRC applies sequentially. Test 1 (expenditure, ss.1039-1142): was qualifying expenditure incurred? Financial records satisfy this. Test 2 (qualifying activity, BEIS/DSIT Guidelines): was the expenditure on work that constitutes R&D, an advance through resolution of scientific or technological uncertainty, assessed by a competent professional? No invoice satisfies Test 2. The tribunal authorities, Hadee, Flame Tree and Tills Plus, all confirm: financial records present, claims denied on Test 2.
The US Research Credit requires qualified research expenditures to satisfy a four-part test: qualified purpose; technological in nature; elimination of uncertainty; process of experimentation. All four must be substantiated with contemporaneous documentation. The IRS position is categorical: retrospective reconstruction of events is not acceptable. The R&D credit has been on the IRS Dirty Dozen list of tax scams every year since 2019.
The court's ruling: 'Trial testimony is not only insufficient to substantiate qualified research activity without further contemporaneous documentation, but is also insufficient to dispute contrary evidence in contemporaneous documentation.' Two directions matter. Contemporaneous documentation beats oral testimony where they conflict. And contemporaneous documentation is required to substantiate a claim; its absence cannot be cured by calling witnesses.
R&D credits were disallowed in full. The court was explicit: the failure was evidentiary, not substantive. The research may have been real. The taxpayer had failed to retain sufficient records to substantiate that the qualifying criteria had been met. General assertions, reconstructed project summaries and aggregated cost allocations did not discharge that burden. The research was real. The record was not. The loss was total.
All three jurisdictions apply the same substantive standard. AusIndustry publishes it explicitly: records must be created and maintained during the income year, not retrospectively. Ireland Revenue and the CRA have signalled increased scrutiny through 2024-2025, with published guidance emphasising contemporaneous technical documentation. The global direction is uniform: evidence must exist at the time the work is done and be provable to exist at that time.
“We have invoices and bank statements.” So does every denied claim.
HMRC applies two sequential tests. Invoices satisfy the first. They are irrelevant to the second.
Yes. Invoices, bank statements, payroll records, subcontractor contracts and time-coded payroll data are the right evidence for this test. HMRC broadly accepts financial records here.
The consultant who says “we have all the invoices” is correct for Test 1. The claim has half its evidence. The half that doesn't fail the enquiry.
HMRC's AIF requires, per project: the advance in science or technology; the uncertainty identified; how and when those uncertainties were overcome, and by whom. No invoice answers any of those questions.
An authentic document written in 2023 is forensically indistinguishable from one written in 2027 and backdated.
The creation date on a Word file can be changed in seconds. SharePoint version histories can be configured. Cloud timestamps record when a file was saved to the cloud, not when the work was done.
Invoices and bank statements prove the money moved. They do not prove what it moved for; and that is the test HMRC now opens enquiries on.
The pattern is consistent. The question is always when.
Across eight cases spanning UK and US law, the research may or may not have been real. The record was not adequate. The consequence followed the evidence gap, not the underlying activity.
First-ever corporate prosecution of an accountancy firm under the Criminal Finances Act 2017 failure-to-prevent offences. Alleged facilitation of approximately £16M in fraudulent R&D claims. Trial scheduled September 2027, Manchester Crown Court. The defence turns on whether the firm had reasonable prevention procedures, procedures whose contemporaneity is itself under forensic scrutiny.
Coordinated raids on two Norwich R&D consultancies. Over £100M in claims. Allegations include technical narratives written retrospectively by staff with no relevant scientific background, for clients whose businesses did not plausibly constitute qualifying R&D. The evidence packs relied on unverifiable timestamps and post-dated project documentation.
IRC §41 credit refused in full. The taxpayer provided oral testimony on what happened. No contemporaneous record of when. The court: 'Trial testimony is not only insufficient to substantiate qualified research activity without further contemporaneous documentation, but is also insufficient to dispute contrary evidence in contemporaneous documentation.'
R&D credits disallowed in full. The court was explicit: the failure was evidentiary, not substantive. The research may have been real. The taxpayer had failed to retain sufficient records to substantiate that the qualifying criteria had been met. General assertions and reconstructed project summaries did not discharge the burden.
The tribunal: 'A major stumbling block for Hadee in making a claim was the lack of records to link subcontractor costs or raw material expenditure to the eligible projects.' The financial records existed. The contemporaneous technical trail linking each line of spend to a qualifying activity did not. Director evidence was 'unreliable, vague and at times inconsistent.'
The tribunal found it 'remarkable' that no evidence was produced from anyone contemporaneously involved in the project. The competent-professional test failed entirely. No-one who had been doing the work at the time gave a coherent technical account of what the uncertainty was or how it was resolved.
'No time recording system in place.' Time allocations were derived from retrospective discussions between directors, not from records made during the project. The managing director had not been involved in the work. Neither witness qualified as a competent professional in software and computing. The invoiced costs were present. The contemporaneous record was not.
The textbook two-test split. The tribunal accepted the expenditure evidence; the payments were made. It rejected the qualifying-activity evidence. The inconsistencies in the technical record, and the absence of a reliable contemporaneous account of what uncertainty existed and when it was resolved, meant the claim failed on Test 2 despite passing Test 1.
The Criminal Finances Act applies to your firm. Not just your clients.
Section 45 creates strict corporate liability. If any person associated with your firm criminally facilitates tax evasion, your firm commits an offence unless it can evidence reasonable prevention procedures.
The statutory defence is reasonable prevention procedures: training records showing staff were instructed on what constitutes qualifying R&D; supervision logs showing partner-level review; claim review sign-offs dated before submission.
If those records exist only in editable Word files on a shared drive, the defence is weaker than if the same records were cryptographically anchored at the moment they were created. The first question a forensic expert will ask: can you confirm these documents existed in this form at the date they bear?
First-ever corporate prosecution under CFA 2017 s.45. An R&D-focused accountancy firm. The prosecution of Bennett Verby is not a one-off; it signals what the compliance perimeter now looks like for every R&D advisory practice in the UK. Every firm today is in the same evidentiary position Bennett Verby was in before August 2025.
Every tool your clients use to document R&D has the same problem.
Time-tracking software, project management tools, and document storage all record what someone said they did. None of them can prove it was recorded at the time it was done, on a ledger a regulator can independently verify.
Who logged time against which project code
Does not record what technical work was done, what uncertainty existed, or when it was resolved. Time logs prove staff were billing to a project, not that qualifying R&D activity occurred on that date.
Tasks created, status changes, comments, sprint records
Task descriptions and status changes can be edited after the fact. Timestamps record when the platform received a save event, not when the underlying technical decision or experiment occurred. No independent attestation of record integrity.
File uploads, version history, modification timestamps
Version history records when a file was modified in the platform, not when the content was created. File metadata is editable. Platform timestamps can be gamed by uploading a re-dated file. None of these platforms independently attest to when your document's content first existed.
Plausible technical language describing claimed R&D activity
HMRC is explicit: retrospective explanations do not satisfy the contemporaneity test. An AI narrative written in 2026 about work allegedly done in 2024 is inherently retrospective, regardless of how accurate it is. Green Jellyfish/Kirby & Haslam illustrates the consequence.
Public proof. Private work.
Your files never leave your device. Only a mathematical fingerprint is recorded on a public blockchain, and that record cannot be altered by anyone, including immut.
The SHA-256 hash is computed locally, in your browser. Your technical documentation, lab notes, and project records are not transmitted, stored, or visible to immut.
The hash is written to the public XRP Ledger, a distributed, immutable blockchain. Once written, no party can alter or delete it. The timestamp is the ledger's own consensus time.
immut issues a certificate containing the hash, the XRPL transaction ID, the ledger sequence number, and the UTC timestamp. Independently verifiable by HMRC, a tribunal, or your own counsel.
The record lives on a public blockchain and remains verifiable even if immut ceased to exist. The contemporaneity of your evidence is not dependent on the person producing it.
88 countries. 171 jurisdictions.
Blockchain-anchored certificates are already accepted as legal evidence in UK courts, EU member states, and over 80 other jurisdictions.
Qualified electronic time-stamps have the legal effect of evidence of the date, time, and integrity of the data across all 27 EU Member States.
US District Court for DC admitted blockchain records as primary evidence, establishing that public blockchain data satisfies US federal evidentiary standards.
Blockchain-stored evidence is presumptively authentic under Chinese law. Over 1,400 IP cases subsequently decided on blockchain-anchored evidence.
Paris commercial court accepted a blockchain timestamp as proof of prior creation in an IP dispute, without requiring production of the underlying file.
If HMRC asked you to prove the qualifying work happened when you say it did, not just that you paid for it, could you?
Prove your first file in minutes.
Takes seconds. Works on any file type. No installation required.