PRIVACY STATEMENT

Valley Tax Advisors, LLC (“VTA”) is committed to protecting your privacy. This privacy statement describes why and how we collect, use, and share personal information collected from individuals themselves or from other third parties, and provides information about individuals’ rights with respect to their personal information. We may use personal information provided to us for any of the purposes described in the relevant section of this privacy statement or as otherwise stated at the point of collection.  

Our goal is to process personal information as necessary for our legitimate business purposes in a transparent manner. If you have any questions regarding our privacy practices, please contact us as set forth in the Contact Us section below. 

Information collection 

When you access or otherwise use our Site, we will collect information about you and how you interact with our Site. We collect information about you through: (1) information you provide; (2) automatic tracking technologies; and (3) third parties. 

We collect and use business contact details for individuals associated with existing and potential VTA clients to manage and maintain our relationship with those individuals. Like most businesses, we use a client relationship management system to store personal information about our client and related business contacts.  

The collection of personal and business information about contacts and the addition of that information to the VTA database is initiated by VTA staff and may include name, employer name, title, phone, email, and other business contact details. In addition, VTA may collect data from VTA communication and calendar systems concerning interactions between VTA staff and client or business contacts. 

When we send you electronic communications, we may use technologies to determine whether the communications have been opened and whether the links contained within the message have been clicked on. We may combine information collected through these means with other information we maintain about you to measure interest in our specific offerings and campaigns, improve our offerings to specific target audiences, and tailor our interactions with you.  

Given the diversity of services we provide to clients, we process many categories of personal and business information, which may include: 

• Personal details (e.g., name, age/date of birth, gender, marital status, country of residence); 
• Contact details (e.g., email address, phone number, postal address); 
• Financial details (e.g., salary, payroll details and other financial-related details such as income, investments and other financial interests, benefits, tax status); 
• Job details (e.g., role, grade, experience, performance information and other information about management and employees); and  

Generally, we collect personal information from our clients or from third parties acting on the instructions of the client.

Information use 

We use this information for the following business purposes: 

• Providing professional services and products 

We provide a diverse range of professional services and products. Some of our services require us to process personal information to provide advice and deliverables.  

• Administering, managing, and developing our business and services.  

We may process personal information to run our business, including: 

• • Managing our relationship with clients; 
  • Providing services and customer support to our clients; 
  • Developing our business and services, such as identifying client needs and improvements in service delivery and learning more about a client relationship opportunity we have an interest in; 
  • Analyzing and evaluating the strength of interactions between VTA and a contact; 
  • Performing analytics, including producing metrics for VTA leadership, such as on trends, relationship maps, sales intelligence, and progress against account business goals; 
  • Maintaining and using IT systems; 
  • Hosting or facilitating the hosting of events; and 
  • Administering and managing our website, systems, and applications. 
• Providing information about us and our range of services  

Unless we are asked not to, we use client business contact details to provide information that we think will be of interest about VTA and our services. For example, we may send you industry updates and insights, information about other services that may be relevant to you and invites to events. 

• Security, quality, and risk management activities 
  • 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 and hold personal information as part of our client engagement and acceptance procedures, including carrying out searches using publicly available sources — such as internet searches and sanctions lists — to help identify heightened risk individuals and organizations and checking 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, 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 in the course of 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 and develop new VTA technologies and offerings. To the extent that the information we receive while providing professional services contains personal information, we will de-identify the information prior to using it for these purposes. 

Information retention 

Personal or business information will be retained by VTA for as long as we have, or need to keep a record of, a relationship with an individual or business contact. Personal or business information may be held for longer periods where extended retention periods are required by law, regulation, or professional standards and to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.  

Information sharing 

We may share personal or business information with third parties.  

Our policy is to collect only the personal or business information necessary for agreed purposes, and we ask our clients only to share personal or business information with us when it is needed for those purposes. When we need to process personal or business information to provide our services, we ask our clients to provide the necessary information to the data subjects concerned regarding how VTA will process that information, as our clients are typically in the appropriate position to communicate this information to the data subjects (e.g., our clients’ employees or our clients’ customers).  

Information you provide 

When you access our Site, you may choose to provide information about yourself such as your name, address, email address, telephone number, fax number, job title, and company name. By way of example, you may choose to provide your information in the following circumstances:  

• Subscription or ordering newsletters and/or publications; 
• Participation in “join our mailing list” initiatives; 
• Participation in bulletin boards, discussion, or message forums; 
• Entering quick surveys, quizzes or benchmarking surveys; 
• Registration for events and conferences; 
• Registration for premium online services; 
• Contacting us for further information; 
• Visiting our Site while logged into a social media platform. 

Automatically collected information  

We may use online identification technologies, such as cookies, web beacons, or pixels on some pages of our Site (“Tracking Technologies”). The information we collect using these technologies includes: IP address, browser type and language, access time, and referring website. Cookies are small text files placed on your hard drive that assist us in providing a more customized website experience. For example, a cookie can be used to store registration information in an area of the website so that a user does not need to re-enter it on subsequent visits to that area. VTA may use Tracking Technologies from marketing partners on our Site, third party sites, and social media platforms. These Tracking Technologies help to measure the efficacy of our marketing and awareness campaigns and to understand how visitors navigate to our Site from a VTA ad. We use these technologies to compile aggregated statistics about visitors who interact with VTA online content, to gauge the effectiveness of our ads and to better provide more pertinent information to our visitors.

Third-party analytics 

VTA also uses website analytics providers which may set cookies in your browser. Site activity information collected by these analytics providers may be combined with personal information held by VTA. 

To properly manage our Site we also log anonymous information on our operational systems and identify categories of visitors by items such as domains and browser types. These statistics are reported in the aggregate to our webmasters. This is to improve the web experience of our Site’s visitors and to provide us with an effective information resource. 

When we send you electronic communications, we may use technologies to determine whether the communications have been opened and whether the links contained within the messages have been clicked on. We may combine information collected through these means with other information we maintain about you in order to measure interest in our specific offerings and communications campaigns, improve our offerings to specific target audiences, and tailor our interactions with you.  

Information use of Third-party analytics

We use the information we collect as described above for various purposes depending on the context in which we collected the information. For example, it may be necessary for us to process your information in order to process a transaction or provide a service you have requested or otherwise in accordance with a contract between us, or we may process your information in accordance with your prior consent (where you have provided such consent).  

We also use the information we collect for the following business purposes: 

• Operating and improving the Site; 
• Fulfilling your orders and requests; 
• Managing your registration preferences; 
• Customizing the Site for you; 
• Understanding how the Site is being used; 
• Exploring ways to develop and grow our business; 
• Maintaining and improving the safety and security of the Site;  
• Preventing and enhancing protection against fraud, spam, harassment, intellectual property infringement, crime and security risks; 
• Sending you renewal notifications and/or service notifications; 
• Conducting customer satisfaction surveys; 
• Improving our products and services; 
• Running our operations; 
• Complying with law and legal obligations; 
• Responding to your inquiries; and 
• Sending communications about VTA products, services, and events. 

Third party sites 

Our Site may link to other websites which do not operate under VTA’s privacy practices. When you link to other websites, VTA’s privacy practices no longer apply. We encourage you to review each site’s privacy policy before disclosing any personal information. 

Children 

VTA understands the importance of protecting children’s privacy, especially in an online environment. The Site is not intentionally designed for or directed at children under the age of 13 years. It is VTA’s policy never to knowingly collect or maintain personal information about children under the age of 13. 

Your choices

• Unsubscribe 

Should you wish to unsubscribe from our mailing list or any registrations, we will provide instructions in the appropriate area of the Site or in communications to you.  

• Managing cookies 

If you are concerned about cookies, most browsers permit individuals to decline cookies. In most cases, you may refuse or delete one or more cookies and still access our Site, but Site functionality may be impaired. After you finish browsing our website, you may delete Site cookies from your system if you wish. 

• Do not track 

Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that you can set in your web browser to send a message to the website operator requesting not to be tracked. Currently, we do not respond to these DNT signals. For more information about DNT, visit https://allaboutdnt.com. 

Attendees of VTA events 

We may collect personal information from attendees and participants of VTA-sponsored events. When we do so, such information is provided directly and voluntarily by the visitor. Unless separate privacy terms are provided to the visitor at or in connection with the event, any personal information collected will be treated in accordance with the applicable section of this privacy statement.  

Visitors to our office 

We have security measures in place to protect our offices, such as secured entrance doors, visitor management procedures, and an alarm activation system. 

Security system 

The VTA office is protected with security equipment at all entrance doors providing access control, auditing, and intrusion detection. The security system records activity at all entrance points and high security areas. Any video images or other data captured are securely stored and only accessed on a need to know basis for investigative purposes only (e.g., to investigate an incident occurring at one of our locations). All security information is stored for a minimum of 90 days. We may disclose security data to law enforcement bodies as requested and permitted by data protection law. 

Guest WiFi 

We monitor traffic on our guest WiFi networks using industry standard intrusion detection systems. This allows us to see limited information about a user’s network behaviors but will include being able to see at least the source and destination addresses the user is connecting from and to. We cannot inspect any encrypted traffic and therefore do not have access to any information (personal or otherwise) that the user might share via encrypted connections. 

Others who get in touch with us  

We collect personal and business information (such as name, contact details and contents of the communication) when an individual gets in touch with us with a question, complaint, or feedback. In these cases, we will only use the information for the purpose of responding to and keeping a record of the communication. We may share personal information with third parties.  

Security 

VTA has implemented generally accepted standards of technology and operational security designed to protect personal and business information from loss, misuse, alteration, or destruction. Only authorized VTA personnel and the third parties described in this privacy statement are provided access to personal information and these employees and third parties have agreed to maintain the confidentiality of this information. 

Contact us 

If you have questions about this privacy statement or about our privacy practices, please contact us at: info@vta.com.