SR&ED Filing Deadlines

Below you will find a breakdown of the fiscal year ends with the SR&ED Tax Credit deadlines. Depending on which deadline a company submits their claim will affect the response time by CRA.

Many companies are aware of the 18-month SR&ED deadline. Once the 18-month deadline has passed, you cannot claim the SR&ED Tax Credit for that given fiscal year-end. What usually is not talked about or is overlooked by companies is the original filing deadline (6-months). This filing deadline is in correspondence with filing the company’s taxes for the fiscal year at the same time. In doing so, this is called original filing as the company is filing with their taxes. After the original filing date, an SR&ED claim can still be filed but it will be deemed amended. So, what is the big difference between the two filing deadlines?

The advantages of filing an SR&ED claim original are:

• Quicker response time on your claim from CRA as it will be within 120 days
• CRA will consider the claim stronger as the company has filed with their taxes (everything is up to date)
• Usually, a stronger claim is put together as the fiscal year-end recently finished. Many times, a company may forget or have not tracked something correctly when they look back at the fiscal year-end 18 months from now.

There is definitely no issue in filing by the 18-month deadline, but here at Braithwaite Canada, we encourage all of our clients to file by the 6-month original deadline.