It is fairly common for CRA to assign the same reviewer to the same SRED claimant’s files year after year. That ensures fairly consistent treatment ---- consistent with the treatment you are used to, that is, but not necessarily consistent with how other taxpayers are being treated. In that circumstance, if you file your own claim, or if your claim is being filed by someone who does not file many claims, you will likely never know or not know until it is too late to do anything about it.
This is a prime advantage of using an outside SRED Consultant. Outside consultants know how other taxpayers are being assessed and can help ensure that you are treated fairly. If your CRA reviewer encourages you to file your own claim and to not use an outside consultant, be on the alert.
This is not to suggest CRA employees are trying to do you out of your entitlement; we find that most of the staff in the SRED offices of CRA try to help and to be fair. Nevertheless, when you are the same one looking at the same company’s claims year after year and when you are doing it in a situation in which staff from one SRED reviewing office do not often mingle with staff of other offices, it is understandable that objectivity and equal treatment might suffer for want of “cross-pollination”.
