Clarify which employment and relationship records need assessment and who will provide them. Separate official charges from professional and retrieval work.
Define the factual reconciliation
Ask whether the scope includes resolving overlapping dates and employer information. More records do not necessarily establish eligibility if they describe a different arrangement from the one claimed. The actual facts should guide the work.
Fee questions become answerable once the work is assigned to someone. Three distinct tasks hide inside a divided-employment review: retrieving records from each employer, reconciling them into one account of the period, and advising whether that account meets the requirement. Different parties may perform them, and a corporate human resources department can often retrieve at no charge what an adviser would bill hours to chase, so ask who is doing each task before asking what it costs.
Confirm in the engagement terms whether resolving conflicting dates and employer information sits inside the quoted scope or outside it, because that is the item most often assumed and least often written down. Government filing fees are set by the agency and should be confirmed at the time of filing; they are not part of the professional estimate. Note the direction of the relationship as well: adding records does not improve a case whose records describe a different arrangement from the one claimed.