No. An SR&ED consultant does not need to be in your city, or even your province. SR&ED is a federal program claimed on Form T661 and filed with your T2 return, so the work travels over email, video calls and a shared document folder. The physical distance between you and the person writing your technical narrative changes nothing about the claim.
What matters is the reverse: your consultant needs to understand where you operate. Provincial and territorial R&D credits attach to the province where the work is performed and where your corporation has a permanent establishment. Most provinces and territories run their own R&D credit as well, and where one exists it makes your total return larger. How much larger depends on the province.
So "near you" is the wrong search. The right search is "can this person handle my technical field and my province." A provincial and territorial R&D tax credits overview from the CRA is worth reading before your first call, so you can tell whether the consultant knows your jurisdiction cold.
The technical writing. A strong SR&ED consultant can take a messy account of what your engineers tried, failed at, and retried, and turn it into a defensible answer to the three questions the CRA actually asks on Form T661. A weak one photographs your payroll, applies a rate, and hopes.
Those three questions live in Part 2, Section B of T661, one set per project. Line 242 asks what scientific or technological uncertainty you attempted to overcome, in 350 words. Line 244 asks what work you performed in the tax year to overcome it, in 700 words. Line 246 asks what advancement you achieved or attempted, in 350 words. If a consultant cannot explain how they will source those answers from your team, keep looking.
Eligibility itself is a two-part test, and a good consultant applies it before writing a word. The work must aim to advance scientific knowledge or achieve a technological advancement, and it must proceed as a systematic investigation by experiment or analysis to resolve an uncertainty the existing knowledge base could not settle. The CRA’s guidelines on the eligibility of work set both out. Note what is not required: success. Failed or abandoned work can still qualify. A consultant who tells you a failed project is not claimable does not understand the program.
Fee models vary, and they change your incentives. The two you will meet most are contingency (a percentage of the refund) and flat fee. A contingency preparer earns more when your claim is bigger, which is fine when it aligns with reality and a problem when it nudges the claim past what the work supports. A flat-fee preparer earns the same whether your claim is aggressive or conservative, which removes that pull.
Neither model is automatically honest or dishonest. What you are testing is whether the consultant will file something they can defend. An overstated claim does not just get trimmed. If the CRA selects it for review, you carry the burden of proof, and a claim that cannot be supported can be reduced to what the records back, which may be well below what you were promised.
When your claim is small, clean, and you understand it. If your R&D is a handful of employees on one or two clearly uncertain software or engineering projects, your payroll is tidy, and you can write plainly about what you tried and why it was uncertain, a consultant’s fee may cost you more than the help returns. Say your total qualifying base is modest and salary-only. The federal refund on that is real money, but not so much that a preparer’s fee leaves you clearly ahead.
That is the honest answer many firms will not give you. Small teams often can file a first claim themselves using the CRA’s guide to writing your Form T661 project description.
You want help when the claim is large, when eligibility is genuinely arguable, when multiple provinces or a mix of employees and contractors complicate the base, or when you have been reviewed before and it went badly. In those cases a strong preparer earns their fee several times over. The rub is judging which case you are in, and that judgement takes an honest look at the size and complexity of your claim.
Work through this before you shortlist anyone.
Finding an SR&ED consultant "near you" is the wrong goal. Find one who can defend your technical narrative, who knows your province’s rules, who is straight about fees, and who will meet the 18-month deadline. If your claim is small enough to handle yourself, do that instead. If it is not, the right preparer pays for itself.
Yes. Your provincial credit follows your corporation’s permanent establishment and where the R&D is performed, not the consultant’s location. Their office address is irrelevant to that.
A refundable claim accepted as filed is targeted for processing within 60 calendar days; one selected for review takes 180 days from a complete filing. During review, the burden is on you to support the claim. Ask any consultant, before signing, whether audit defense is included in their fee.
No. Form T661 gives the project technical information and calculates expenditures and qualified expenditures, ending at total qualified SR&ED expenditures for ITC purposes. The credit is calculated separately: corporations use Schedule T2SCH31, individuals use Form T2038(IND). A consultant who calls T661 "the tax credit form" is being loose.
Talk to at least two or three. The useful signal is not the promised refund, which nobody can size honestly upfront, but how each one reasons about eligibility, which projects they would decline, and how they source your technical narrative. Consistency between them on eligibility is reassuring; wild differences are a warning.
Not on its own. A larger promise usually means a more aggressive read of eligibility, and the CRA can reduce a claim to what your records support. Compare the reasoning, not the headline number. A defensible smaller claim beats an overstated one that unravels under review.
Only if you are still inside the window. You have 18 months after that fiscal year-end to file, full stop. A December 31, 2024 year-end closes on June 30, 2026. If the deadline has passed, no consultant can recover it, so check the date before you spend time shopping for one.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Tax figures depend on your corporation type, province, and taxation year.
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