The Silence After Filing
You filed your T661. Weeks of documentation work, salary allocations, project descriptions. Then nothing. Months of nothing.
First-time filers fixate on this silence. No confirmation email, no tracking number that actually updates, no way to know if a human has even looked at it yet. Every week without contact feels like something went wrong.
It probably didn’t. The CRA review process follows a predictable sequence, and most of that silence is just government machinery grinding through its queue.
Stage 1: Initial Processing (Weeks 1-4)
After your T2 corporate tax return hits CRA with the T661 attached, it gets logged and assigned to a tax centre. Staff verify that all required forms are present, confirm the filing deadline was met, and route it into the system.
You won’t hear anything. Move on with your life.
Stage 2: Desk Review or Claim Review (Months 2-6)
This is where CRA decides how hard to look at your claim. There are a few paths:
Accepted as filed. Many claims go through without further review. CRA’s system checks the filing, nothing gets flagged, and your credit is assessed as claimed. Quiet and painless.
Desk review. A paper-only examination. CRA looks at your documentation without contacting you. They may request additional documents by mail or through My Business Account, but you never sit across from anyone.
Detailed claim review. Both technical and financial review. This is the one that keeps first-time filers up at night.
Here’s what they don’t tell you: first-time filers tend to get selected for detailed review more often. CRA has no history with your company [2]. No prior claims to compare against. A review is how they build that baseline. Being selected says nothing about the quality of your claim. It says you’re new.
Stage 3: The Technical Review
This is the stage that actually matters. If you’re going to spend time preparing for anything, spend it here.
A Research and Technology Advisor (RTA) contacts you. RTAs hold postgraduate degrees in science or engineering [3]. They are not accountants. They are not adversaries. Their job is to determine whether your work involved real technological uncertainty and whether you investigated it systematically. They are not trying to trip you up.
Most people misunderstand this meeting. They prepare like it’s a cross-examination. It’s not. It’s a technical conversation with someone who has the background to follow along.
What the meeting looks like
Usually a phone call or video meeting. An hour or two per project. The RTA asks:
- What were you trying to achieve technically?
- What was uncertain at the outset?
- What approaches did you try, and what happened?
- How did you arrive at a solution, or determine the approach wasn’t viable?
They may ask for supporting documentation: design notes, test results, code repositories, internal communications showing the progression of your work.
How to prepare
Walk through your work chronologically. Here’s what we thought would work. Here’s why it didn’t. Here’s what we tried next. Here’s what we learned.
That narrative, backed by records you kept as the work happened (not reconstructed six months later), is what the RTA wants to see. Teams that can tell this story clearly, with timestamps and artifacts to back it up, get through reviews fast. Teams that show up with a polished summary written after the fact and no supporting evidence? That’s when reviews drag on and claims get reduced.
The difference between a smooth review and a painful one almost always comes down to whether documentation was maintained during the project or assembled for the filing.
Stage 4: The Financial Review
A financial reviewer may separately examine your expenditure calculations. They check that costs are correctly categorized, salary allocations are reasonable, and any other government assistance is properly reported.
This runs in parallel with the technical review. Different people, different focus.
Stage 5: Notice of Assessment or Reassessment
CRA issues a decision. Three outcomes:
Full approval. Claim accepted as filed. Credit applied as you calculated.
Partial adjustment. CRA reduces some portion of the claim. Maybe they cut eligible expenditures for a project, or determine one project doesn’t qualify while others do. For first-time filers, partial adjustments are common. In our experience, getting the majority of your first claim accepted is a solid result. You learn from the adjustments. You file better next year.
Denial. The entire claim is rejected. This is rare, and typically happens when the work fundamentally doesn’t meet the SR&ED definition or when documentation is so thin that CRA can’t verify the claim at all.
Timelines: What’s Realistic
CRA’s current published service standards: 60 calendar days for claims accepted as filed, 180 calendar days for refundable claims selected for review [1].
In practice? It depends. Claims selected for detailed review take longer. First-time claims take longer. How quickly you respond to information requests matters more than people realize. Sitting on a CRA letter for three weeks while you gather documents pushes your whole timeline back.
A long wait by itself means nothing. Your claim is in the queue behind thousands of others.
What You Can Do While You Wait
Don’t waste the waiting period.
Document your current work now. If you’re doing R&D work right now, write it down as it happens. Contemporaneous notes are always more credible than reconstructions, and they’re easier to produce. Open a shared doc, log your uncertainties, your experiments, your dead ends. Five minutes at the end of the week beats two days of reconstruction at tax time.
Track what you learn from this claim. When your assessment comes back, read the adjustments carefully. If CRA reduced a project, understand why. That feedback shapes your next filing more than any guide or consultant can.
The Bottom Line
The CRA review process is thorough but not mysterious. There are no trick questions. The RTA wants to see that real technical work happened, that uncertainty existed at the start, and that you investigated it with some rigor. If that’s what happened, the review is a conversation about your work. Nothing more.
File a claim that’s so well-documented it reviews itself.
If you’re preparing for your first SR&ED claim or waiting on the results of one, our readiness check can help you understand where your documentation stands and what to expect next.
References
[1] Canada Revenue Agency, “SR&ED Program Service Standards.” [Online]. Available: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-research-experimental-development-tax-incentive-program/program-service-standards.html
[2] Canada Revenue Agency, “The SR&ED Review Process: A Guide for Claimants.” [Online]. Available: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/scientific-research-experimental-development-tax-incentive-program/technical-review-a-guide-claimants.html
[3] Canada Revenue Agency, “Minimum Education Standards.” [Online]. Available: https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/corporate/careers-cra/browse-job-types/cra-s-minimum-education-standards.html