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Red flag

No one speaks to your engineers

The technical case for a claim is written best by someone who has talked to the people who did the work. A claim prepared entirely from documents or from the finance team is easier to get wrong.

A red flag is a reason to ask more questions. It does not mean an adviser has done anything wrong. This page describes a practice in general terms and is not about any particular firm.

When it is a problem

  • The technical descriptions are written from a questionnaire or from finance records, and the people who did the work have never been asked about it.
  • The claim covers complex or unusual work that a description from documents cannot capture.
  • Your technical staff read the claim, if they see it at all, and do not recognise the work in it.
  • A review would be answered by people who cannot explain the work, because nobody who understood it was involved in the claim.

When it is not a problem

  • Your technical lead wrote the descriptions, and the adviser's role is the tax treatment and the numbers.
  • The claim is small and repeats last year's, when the interviews were done, and nothing has changed.
  • The adviser interviewed the people who did the work in a previous year and has checked with them that the work is the same.
  • Your business is small enough that the owner is the engineer, and the adviser has spent the time with them.

What to do

  1. Ask who will write the technical case and who they will talk to.
  2. Ask for time in the process for your technical staff to be interviewed and to read the result.
  3. Before filing, ask the people who did the work to read the descriptions and say whether they are true.
  4. Keep a record of those conversations; they are what a review will ask about.
The matching green flagThey talk to the people who did the work

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