HMRC Research & Development Communication Forum (RDCF) Summary – 10th March 2026

Author: Jen Badger Published: 17^th March, 2026

HMRC held their bi-annual RDCF meeting last week. Happily, there was very little in the way of changes announced.

While there were few major policy announcements, the meeting included useful updates on advance assurance, enquiry handling, HMRC’s use of AI and NI ERIS.

Here’s our summary of the important points:

Advance Assurance Pilot

Starting in early May, HMRC will be running a pilot of a new advance assurance service for R&D tax relief claims. Participation will be voluntary, with participants being able to ask for assurance about two of four aspects of a claim. These are:

Whether the project meets HMRC’s definition of R&D
Whether overseas expenditure has been dealt with correctly
Whether the claimant company can claim for contracted-out R&D
Whether the company meets the criteria for an exemption from the PAYE/NIC cap

Further information will be published closer to the time about how claimants and advisers can take advantage of the service.

Enquiries

HMRC announced that enquiry work is being ‘refocused’ to within the WBMC I&R team and away from the ISBC C&P teams. Open enquiries within the ISBC team will be worked to closure over the next few months before the team moves onto other work. Some of these team members will be redeployed to the WMBC team, so as not to lose the expertise that has been built up over the past few years.

For claimants, this should be seen as good news – it should signal the end of one-to-many enquiry campaigns, and a return to named caseworkers on enquiries.

Use of AI

Every employee at HMRC now has access to Copilot, with R&D tax relief staff using it in line with the government guidance on ethical use of AI. These AI tools are not used to make decisions, but to support case workers in their day-to-day work.

HMRC also discussed trials of a ‘summariser’ tool, which have recently concluded. This tool is used to summarise information from the AIF in order to speed up case selection. This has not been used on live cases yet, and the trial data is still under review.

NI ERIS claims

HMRC went through the rules of the NI ERIS scheme, as we’ve written about before. They also shared details of the EU Aid Register (eAIR), which currently lists all general de minimis aid awarded within the EU. This will be a great help for any advisers preparing NI ERIS claims who need to check what previous de minimis aid their clients have received.

Other points

It was confirmed that overseas restrictions do apply to RDEC claims made by companies based in NI
Mistakes made when entering the UTR or accounting period dates in the CNF or AIF can be corrected by making representations to HMRC
HMRC are seeing fewer claims being made, but R&D expenditure remains stable
HMRC aims to process 85% of claims within 40 days, and hit 90% of this last year
Wait times for ADR have reduced due to lower demand for the service
Tax advisor registration becomes mandatory from 18th May 2026

Our overall impression was that HMRC are looking forward to a period of stability as much as advisers and claimants, and we should hopefully see a more measured approach to compliance and administration over the next year.

The meeting minutes are published on the GOV.UK website. All previous minutes, and when updated, the latest minutes, can be viewed below:

RDCF Meeting Minutes