CPAs, like all providers of personal financial services, are now required by law to inform their clients of their policies regarding privacy of client information. CPAs have been and continue to be bound by professional standards of confidentiality that are even more stringent than those required by law. Therefore, we continue to protect your right to privacy.
We collect nonpublic personal information about you that is either provided by you or obtained with your authorization.
For current and former clients, we do not disclose any nonpublic personal information obtained in the course of our practice except when expressly authorized by the client, or 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 that 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 state Code of Professional Conduct, certain nonpublic information about you may be disclosed in the following situations:
Should we receive any request for the disclosure of privileged information from any third party, we will notify you. In the event you direct us to 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.
We retain records relating to professional services that we provide so that we are better able to assist with your professional needs and, in some cases, to comply with professional guidelines. To guard your nonpublic personal information, we maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards that comply with professional standards.
To protect our client’s privacy, we provide secure online client access through CCH Axcess Portal (identified as “Client Login” on our homepage) wherein we provide secure, private access to your tax returns and other confidential documents as well as a secure method for you to upload private information to us. In addition, we provide an encrypted and bi-directional secure file exchange service hosted by SafeSend (identified as “Secure File Exchange” on our homepage).
When providing documents containing private information to you, they will be sent via either SafeSend or CCH Axcess Portal. We urge all clients to take advantage of these convenient and simple ways to deliver confidential information to us rather than by way of traditional email service. Information contained in either the text of an email or its attachments may not be secure against interception across the internet. To the extent, however, we communicate with you via traditional email transmission, care is taken to not disclose personal and confidential information in its body or attachments. Nevertheless, we cannot guarantee or warrant the emails from us will be properly delivered and read only by the addressee.
Please call if you have any questions. Your privacy, our professional ethics, and the ability to provide you with quality financial services are very important to us.
