Beer Express Ltd v HMRC

What happened

Beer Express Ltd claimed enhanced R&D tax relief for four projects: AI-enabled inventory forecasting, craft beer development, product rebranding, and a B2B logistics platform. HMRC opened a compliance check and rejected the claims. The company's technical reports had been prepared by an external firm, "RDT Active," which subsequently became unavailable. Mr Narang, the founder, gave evidence but admitted he had not been responsible for the design, creation, planning and implementation of the technical work. The key software developer, Mr Shivam, did not appear as a witness. The tribunal accepted Mr Narang as "truthful and credible" (explicitly not a fraud case) but held the appeal failed because the appellant could not produce contemporaneous evidence from a competent professional. The reports were "bald assertions unsupported by evidence from a competent professional with contemporaneous involvement." The tribunal cited Flame Tree Publishing v HMRC [2024], requiring demonstration that the person giving evidence had appropriate qualifications, experience, and up-to-date knowledge at the time the work was done. The appeal failed not because the work did not happen, but because there was no contemporaneous, independently verifiable record that it did.