Who counts as a competent professional?

Why this person matters more than any other fact in the claim

The guidelines never define the competent professional, but almost every operative test is written by reference to one. Whether there is an advance depends on what is readily deducible by a competent professional. Whether there is uncertainty depends on what a competent professional could readily resolve. Whether an improvement is appreciable is judged by the standards of the field, as a competent professional would understand them.

So the competent professional is not a document-signing formality at the end of the process. They are the measuring instrument. If you have not identified yours, you have not yet established anything about your claim, because every question you need to answer is asked in their voice.

What they need to have

HMRC’s compliance guidance sets three requirements. A competent professional should:

• be knowledgeable about the relevant scientific or technological principles involved;
• be aware of the current state of knowledge in the field as a whole; and
• have accumulated experience and a successful track record in that field.

The second is the one that gets missed. Someone can be a highly capable practitioner and still not track what is happening in the field beyond their own work. Awareness of the field as a whole is what makes their view of the baseline worth anything.

Do they need qualifications?

No. Qualifications are evidence of competence, not the test of it.

A tribunal has accepted as a competent professional a company director with no formal qualifications in the relevant area, on the strength of more than 25 years building financial models, real coding ability and up-to-date knowledge of what software in his domain could do. The tribunal found him a compelling witness who spoke fluently about the technical detail of the work, and that was enough.

The other side of the same coin is a decision where the appeal failed partly because the people put forward were experts in the wrong field. One was a competent professional in publishing with some knowledge of IT, but not in software, programming or computing; another had digital archiving expertise but no software qualifications or programming skills. The work claimed was software work. Domain seniority did not transfer.

Useful evidence of competence, in rough order of how often it is available: relevant qualifications with continuing professional development; a substantial number of years at a high level in the field; publications; patents; recognised industry awards or standing; and, in practice, the ability to talk about the technical detail without notes.

Can they be someone outside the company?

Yes. HMRC’s guidance accepts that a competent professional may work for your company or may not. Where the technical work was done by a contractor or a partner organisation, their people may be the right ones to identify the advance and the uncertainty.

Two cautions. The facts of the claim remain the company’s responsibility even where advisers or contractors are involved, so an external professional’s view does not transfer the risk. And an external professional who is unavailable at enquiry — the contract ended, the individual left — leaves you with a claim nobody can speak to. Get their view recorded, in their words, at the time.

Your adviser is not your competent professional

This needs saying directly, because a good deal of the market has been built on blurring it. An R&D adviser who is not qualified and experienced in your field cannot be the competent professional for your claim, whatever their expertise in the relief. Their job is to ask your competent professional the right questions and to test the answers, not to supply the technical judgement themselves.

A technical narrative written by an adviser, from a one-hour interview, and never read back by a named technical person, is the document that fails in enquiry. It is also the pattern HMRC is looking for.

How many do you need?

As many as the project needs fields. A project spanning materials science and control software may need two, each speaking to their own part. One person asserted as the competent professional across five unrelated projects is not credible and reads as a claim assembled centrally rather than from the work.

What they should be able to explain

Before you file, your competent professional should be able to say, in their own words and without reference to the claim document:

• what field the work sits in, and what their standing in it is;
• what the field could already do at the start of the project, and how they know;
• what advance the project was seeking, expressed as a capability;
• what specifically was uncertain, and why they could not have worked it out from what was published;
• when the uncertainty was resolved, or when work on it stopped, and how they can tell.

If any of those answers has to be looked up in the narrative you are about to file, the claim is not ready.

Position for accounting periods beginning before 1 April 2023

The earlier guidelines, issued in 2004 and updated in 2010, use the competent professional test in the same way and the decisions above were argued under them. Nothing about this entry turns on the boundary.