Rita’s a keen promoter of innovation. It is important to her that Australian companies continue to innovate to enable them to ultimately compete on a global scale. She believes that if Australia doesn’t continue to innovate it will be left behind the rest of the world.

Rita has worked at a large mining company as a research scientist and for over 10 years at a ‘Big 4’ in R&D Incentive consulting. Rita’s background in science enables her to build instantaneous rapport with the company’s financial and technical personnel. “When they learn that I am not an accountant, I can see the change in their responses to my technical queries. They provide me with the nitty gritty technical detail rather than talking about projects at a high level,” she says.

The key issues for companies as regulators are becoming increasingly sophisticated and conducting more and more reviews is that they need to ensure that they can substantiate any R&D claims made. Contemporaneous documentation is vital. Rita believes that it would be very difficult for AusIndustry to dispute whether a trial took place if the company holds dated ‘trial reports’ and other documentation that is crucial to proving R&D activity.

Rita is driven by making a difference to the lives of our clients and to Australia in general. She says that “it comforts me to know that the work we do, optimises R&D incentives with minimal risk to provide the company with more money to hopefully put back into its R&D programs.”