Privacy Policy
This privacy statement was last updated on January 11, 2024.
Plain Language Disclosure (Executive Summary)
Our firm provides accounting, tax preparation, tax planning, business advisory, business valuation, payroll, and bookkeeping services.
Our policy is to collect only the personal information necessary to perform the services we provide. Typically, this information is collected directly from our clients. Sometimes, the information we need is collected from third parties that work with our clients such as bankers, attorneys, and financial advisors.
At present, our firm only uses contractors to provide business valuation and bookkeeping services. Any subcontractor used by our firm is contractually bound to abide by our confidentiality standards and we have obtained reasonable assurance that they have security measures in place to protect client nonpublic personal information.
Detailed Privacy Statement:
Types of information we may collect:
- Personal details (e.g., name, age/date of birth, social security number, tax identification number, gender, marital status, country of residence);
- Contact details (e.g., email address, phone number, postal address);
- Login credentials (e.g., email address or username, password);
- Financial details (e.g., salary, payroll details and other financial-related details such as income, investments and other financial interests, benefits, tax status);
- Income and expense details (e.g., sales information, expense information, bank statements, loan information, receipts);
- Real estate details (e.g., contracts, settlement statements, promissory notes)
- Estate planning documents (e.g., wills, trust instruments, death certificates)
- Job details (e.g., role, grade, experience, performance information and other information about management and employees); and
- Survey or quiz responses;
We collect such personal information from our clients or from third parties acting on the instructions of the client, but in limited cases may collect information directly from the data subjects or from publicly available sources, in each case on behalf of our clients.
Information use
We use the above personal information for the following business purposes:
- Providing the following professional services and products: accounting, tax preparation, tax planning, business advisory, business valuation, payroll, and bookkeeping services. We may also seek feedback and opinions in surveys (e.g. benchmarking) or quizzes.
-
Security, quality and risk management activities
- Personal information, such as client users’ login credentials, may be processed to administer and manage our websites, applications, and other online services that we make available to clients, including to confirm and authenticate identity and prevent unauthorized access.
- Personal information may be processed as part of the security monitoring that we undertake to detect, investigate and resolve security threats — for example, automated scans to identify harmful emails (e.g., phishing attempts).
- We monitor the services provided to clients for quality purposes and risk management purposes, which may involve processing personal information stored on the relevant client file.
- We collect personal information as part of our client engagement and acceptance procedures (e.g. vetting), including carrying out searches using publicly available and/or third party sources to help identify heightened risk individuals and organizations and check that there are no issues that would prevent us from working with a particular client, such as sanctions, criminal convictions, conduct or other reputational issues, including with respect to company directors.
-
Complying with any requirement of law, regulation or a professional body of which we are a member
- As with any provider of professional services, we are subject to legal, regulatory and professional obligations. Subject to these obligations, and as described in the Information retention section below, we need to keep certain records to demonstrate that our services are provided in compliance with those obligations, and those records may contain personal information.
We are continually looking for ways to help our clients and improve our business and services. Where agreed with our clients, we may use information that we receive while providing professional services for other lawful purposes, including analysis to better understand a particular issue, industry or sector, provide insights to our clients, improve our business, service delivery and offerings.
Information retention
We retain the personal information processed by us in accordance with the terms of our client agreements. At present, our standard document retention policy is 7 years.
Information disclosure
We may disclose personal information as described in the Information disclosure section below. In addition, we may disclose personal information to:
- Third party organizations that assist us in providing professional services. At present, the firm only uses subcontractors to perform business valuation and bookkeeping services. On certain client engagements, pursuant to our agreements with such clients, we may engage or otherwise work with other providers to help us provide professional services to our clients.
- Our clients. Where we need to process personal information to provide professional services to our clients, we may include personal information in our deliverables, such as the reports we create.