Privacy Policy

Privacy & Portal Use Policy

Our primary goal is to help you with your business and to provide you, our clients, with the best accounting, tax and professional consulting services. We are and always have been committed to the protection of our clients’ privacy.

Types of Nonpublic Personal Information We Collect

We collect nonpublic personal information about you that is provided to us by you or obtained by us with your authorization. We use that information to prepare your income tax returns and may also use it to provide various tax and financial planning services to you at your request.

Parties to Whom We Disclose Information

For current and former clients, we do not disclose any non-public personal information obtained in the course of our services except as required or permitted by law. Permitted disclosures include, for instance, providing information to our employees, and in limited situations, to unrelated third parties who need to know certain information to assist us in providing services to you. In all such situations, we stress the confidential nature of information being shared. To the extent permitted by law and any applicable Code of Professional Conduct, certain nonpublic information about you may be disclosed in the following situations:

1. To comply with a validly issued and enforceable subpoena or summons.
2. In the course of a review of our firm’s practices under the authorization of a state or national licensing board, or as necessary to properly respond to an inquiry or complaint from such a licensing board or organization.
3. In conjunction with a prospective purchase, sale, or merger of all or part of our practice, provided that we take appropriate precautions (for example, through a written confidentiality agreement) so the prospective purchaser or merger partner does not disclose information obtained in the course of the review.
4. As a part of any actual or threatened legal proceedings or alternative dispute resolution proceedings either initiated by or against us, provided we disclose only the information necessary to file, pursue, or defend against the lawsuit and take reasonable precautions to ensure that the information disclosed does not become a matter of public record.
5. To provide information to affiliates of the firm and non-affiliated third parties who perform services or functions for us in conjunction with our services to you, but only if we have a contractual agreement with the other party that prohibits it from disclosing or using the information other than for the purposes for which it was disclosed. (Examples of such disclosures include using a third-party software vendor to process and transmit tax returns or engaging a records retention agency to store prior year records.)

Should we receive any request for the disclosure of privileged information from any third party, including a subpoena or IRS summons, we will notify you. In the event you direct us not to make the disclosure, you agree to hold us harmless from any expenses incurred in defending the privilege, including, by way of illustration only, our attorney’s fees, court costs, outside advisor’s costs, or penalties or fines imposed as a result of your asserting the privilege or your direction to us to assert the privilege.

Protecting the Confidentiality and Security of Current and Former Clients’ Information

We retain records relating to the professional services that we provide so that we are better able to assist you with your professional needs and, in some cases, to comply with professional guidelines. In order to guard your non-public personal information, we maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with the professional standards of our industry.

To protect our client’s privacy we provide secure online client access through the NetClient and Sharefile Portals on our homepage, wherein we provide you with secure, private access to your tax returns and other confidential documents as well as a secure method to upload private information to us. We urge all of our clients to take advantage of this convenient and simple way to communicate privately with us rather than by way of email since the information contained in the text of an email or in attachments may not be secure against interception across the Internet. In connection with our work, we may communicate with you or others via email transmission. When providing documents containing private information, at your request, they will be password protected. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee or warrant that emails from us will be properly delivered and read-only by the addressee. The use of our client portal is subject to the terms and conditions contained therein.

Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns regarding this privacy and portal use policy because the security of your information, our professional ethics, and the ability to provide you with quality services are very important to us. Thank you for allowing us to serve your accounting, tax, business consulting, and financial planning needs. We value your business and are committed to protecting your privacy.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.