Honestly, this is a not true. If you work with a decent accounting firm like KPMG’s Vancouver practice, and maintain a decent dev task management system like JIRA, you will be fine to hand over your payroll register and a CSV dump every January. A few weeks later, you have your claim. Once in a while, you have to sit there and talk with the CRA’s auditor.
You have a conjecture that all companies keep good jira task tracking and payroll, AND that all companies contract out big accounting firms like KPMG.
From my personal experience I have been at two Canadian companies who didn’t claim SR&ED and therefore your conjecture is disproven with counter examples.
Some companies don’t keep good enough task tracking, some companies don’t know about SR&ED, some companies think the paperwork and auditing is burdensome, some companies are just lazy.
