How RDTI Lodge works

RDTI Lodge is built solely for the Australian R&D Tax Incentive under Division 355 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997 (Cth), jointly administered by AusIndustry (Department of Industry, Science and Resources) and the Australian Taxation Office.

We do not draft, calculate or advise on the US R&D Credit (IRC §41), the UK and Canadian SR&ED equivalents, EU patent box, or any other foreign R&D incentive. If you ask Karen (our AI assistant) about a non-Australian scheme, she will refuse and point you to a local specialist in that jurisdiction.

The R&D tax offset is calculated under ITAA 1997 s355-100. We apply the published rules verbatim:

• Refundable offset (aggregated turnover < $20M): your corporate tax rate + 18.5 percentage points, applied to your notional R&D deductions.
• Non-refundable offset (aggregated turnover ≥ $20M): tiered by R&D intensity — corporate tax rate + 8.5pp on notional deductions up to 2% intensity, + 16.5pp above.
• Notional deductions are eligible expenditure (s355-205) on registered core (s355-25) and supporting (s355-30, dominant-purpose) activities, apportioned to the income year of incurrence.

Every figure shown in the calculator, estimator and claim workspace is a direct application of those formulas to numbers you entered. We do not insert hypothetical revenue, hypothetical expenditure or industry averages into your figures.

Karen and the draft assistant help you structure what you tell us into the shape AusIndustry expects: hypothesis, technical uncertainty, experiment, outcome — i.e. the Core Activity test. They aggregate evidence and flag missing information against the four-part test; they do not make the final tax decision or run the final ATO math.

• The AI will not invent activities, dates, dollar figures or experiments you didn't describe.
• The AI will not advise on non-Australian R&D schemes, roleplay, or answer off-topic prompts.
• The AI will not substitute for a registered tax agent. Every output is marked as a draft for human review.
• If your input is too vague to meet the Core Activity test, the AI returns a risk flag rather than filler text.

• Primary data store: hosted in Sydney (ap-southeast-2) on managed Postgres with row-level security; every row is scoped to your user account.
• Encryption: TLS 1.2+ in transit, AES-256 at rest.
• Authentication: Google OAuth or email — sessions never leave your browser as plain tokens.
• Access: no RDTI Lodge staff can read your claim data without your explicit support consent.
• Deletion: request deletion at any time and we will remove your claim data within 30 days.

RDTI Lodge is software. We are not a registered tax agent and do not lodge on your behalf. All outputs are drafts based on the information you provide, for your review and sign-off by a registered tax agent before lodgement with AusIndustry and the ATO. You remain responsible for the accuracy of your R&D Tax Incentive registration and your company tax return.