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Privacy Policy

This privacy policy explains how we use any personal information we collect about you while providing our services

 

  1. Definitions

In this Privacy Notice the following definitions shall apply:

“Client Personal Data” means any personal data provided to us by you, or on your behalf, for the purpose of providing our services to you, pursuant to our engagement letter with you;

“Controller” means—

  1. a competent authority that, whether alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data, or

  2. where the purposes and means of the processing of personal data are determined by the law of the European Union or otherwise by the law of the State, a controller nominated—(i) by that law, or (ii) in accordance with criteria specified in that law;

“Data Protection Legislation” means all applicable privacy and data protection legislation and regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation EU 2016/679 as supplemented by the Data Protection Bill 2018 together with other laws which relate to privacy and electronic communications;

“Data Subject” means an individual to whom personal data relate;

“Joint Controller” means, where 2 or more controllers jointly determine the purposes and means of the processing of personal data (referred to as “joint controllers” per the Data Protection Bill 2018), they shall determine their respective responsibilities for compliance in a transparent manner by means of an agreement in writing between them, save in so far as the said responsibilities are determined by the law of the European Union or the law of the State.

“Personal Data” means information relating to—

  1. an identified living individual, or

  2. a living individual who can be identified from the data, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to—

    • an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data or an online identifier, or

    • one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of the individual;

“Processing” of or in relation to personal data, means an operation or a set of operations that is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, including—

  1. the collection, recording, organisation, structuring or storing of the data,

  2. the adaptation or alteration of the data,

  3. the retrieval, consultation or use of the data,

  4. the disclosure of the data by their transmission, dissemination or otherwise

  5. making the data available,

  6. the alignment or combination of the data, or

  7. the restriction, erasure or destruction of the data;

“Processor” means an individual who, or a legal person, public authority, agency or other body that, processes personal data on behalf of a controller, but does not include an employee of a controller who processes such data in the course of his or her employment;

“Special Categories of Personal Data” means—

  1. personal data revealing—

  • the racial or ethnic origin of the data subject,

  • the political opinions or the religious or philosophical beliefs of the data subject, or

  • whether the data subject is a member of a trade union,

  1. genetic data,

  2. biometric data for the purposes of uniquely identifying an individual,

  3. data concerning health, or

  4. personal data concerning an individual’s sex life or sexual orientation.

2. Who We Are

This privacy notice provides you with details of who we are and how we collect and process your personal data.

This is the privacy statement of COLLINS & CO ACCOUNTANTS LTD whose place of business and registered address are Main Street, Loughrea, Co Galway

COLLINS & CO ACCOUNTANTS LTD Statutory Auditors and Accountants “the Firm” (referred to as “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy notice), is a data controller due to our professional obligations which oblige us to take responsibility for your personal data.

Our email address is: admin@connachtaccountancy.com

Our postal address is: Main Street, Loughrea, Co Galway

 We are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requirements to exercise your legal rights please contact John Collins at our office.

  1. THE DATA THAT WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU, THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH WE COLLECT IT AND THE GROUNDS UPON WHICH WE PROCESS IT

Personal data means any information capable of identifying an individual. It does not include anonymised data.

For the purposes of this privacy notice the firm provides the following services:

  • Accounts Preparation

  • Bookkeeping

  • Audit Assignments

  • Taxation compliance and advisory services

  • Payroll Services

  • VAT Services

  • Company Secretarial

We collect two types of data: personal data, and sensitive personal data.

  • Personal data can be used to identify or contact you, and may include: your name, address, date of birth, telephone number, and email address. This will only be collected if you voluntarily submit it to us.

  • Sensitive personal data is relating to your finances, and is collected for the purposes of providing the services listed above. You shall only disclose client personal data to us where:

At Collins & Co Accountants Limited we take your privacy seriously and will only process your personal data:

  • In order to provide our services to you and perform any other obligations in accordance with our engagement with you;

  • In order to comply with our legal or regulatory obligations; and

  • Where it is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests and those interests are not over ridden by the data subjects’ own privacy rights.

We may process the following categories of personal data about you:

  • Engagement Data includes any data which you may provide to us in order to assess whether we are in a position to act for you in relation the agreed services, and, in the event that we are and are willing to do so, the information we need for money laundering identification purposes in advance of formally agreeing to provide the agreed services. It also includes communication and other data generated in the course of providing the agreed services for which we have been engaged.  We process this data to supply our services and to act for you as your auditor/accountant.  Our lawful grounds for processing this data is the performance of a contract to which you are party, providing you with advice in relation to providing the agreed services which we have been engaged and acting for you in connection with that engaged service.  We will only ever process your engagement data for the purpose for which we have been retained, on the basis which you instruct us to act on your behalf on that service and to retain a record of the engagement data to comply with our legal and Institute/Association compliance obligations.

  • Communication Data includes any communication that you send to us whether that be through any contact forms on our website, through email, text, social media messaging, social media posting or any other communication that you may send us. We process this data for the purposes of communicating with you, for record keeping and for the establishment, pursuit or defence of legal claims. Our lawful ground for this processing is our legitimate interests which in this case are to reply to communications sent to us, to keep records and to provide the agreed services for which we have been engaged.

  • Personal Contact Data includes data such as your name, title, address, email address, phone number and contact details,. We process this data to communicate with you, for record keeping and for the establishment, pursuit or defence of legal claims. Our lawful ground for this processing is our legitimate interests which in this case are to reply to communications sent to us, to keep records, to grow our business and remain in contact with you and to provide the agreed services for which we have been engaged.

  •  Special Categories of Data  Special Categories of Data refers to data that includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data and information about criminal convictions and offences. We need to collect the following Special Categories of Data in order to provide the agreed services for which we have been engaged. (e.g. some data regarding employees, their spouses, children and dependent relatives may be processed for the purposes of calculating personal tax credits and allowances. Details of trade union membership of employees may be processed in order to calculate deductions from payroll.)  If your Engagement Data includes special categories of data such as medical or health data we will only process such special categories of data for the purposes of providing you with compliance advice and acting for you as your accountant/auditor in connection with the agreed engaged services

Where we are required to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of the contract between us and you do not provide us with that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the agreed service for which we have been engaged (for example, to continue to act for you in Revenue enquiries). If you don’t provide us with the requested data, we may have to cease to act for you but if we do, we will notify you at the time.

We will only use your personal data for a purpose it was collected for or a reasonably compatible purpose if necessary.  In case we need to use your details for an unrelated new purpose we will let you know and explain the legal grounds for processing.

We may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law.

We do not carry out automated decision making or any type of automated profiling. 

  1. HOW WE COLLECT YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We may collect data about you by you providing the data directly to us (for example by filling in forms on our website or in our offices or by sending us emails and correspondence by post or by speaking with us on the telephone and in meetings).  We may collect data from third parties who you authorise us to obtain the data from on your behalf (for example the Revenue Commissioners, the Companies Registration Office, financial institutions or another professional or adviser).

5. Your information and third party service providers

Third Party Service Providers: We may share your personal information to third party service providers that perform services on our behalf such as tax specialists, IT service providers, shredding companies, and providers of security and administrative services.

An Garda Síochána, government bodies, or other government officials: we may share your personal information with an Gardaí, or other government bodies or agencies including but not limited to the Revenue Commissioners, where required to do so by law.

Regulatory Authorities: we may share your personal information with our supervisory bodies Association of Certified Public Accountants,IAASA, CARB, Other Regulatory Authorities, where required to do so by law.

Third Parties: We may provide your information to third parties to facilitate your instructions to us, such as lawyers, parties to any professional claim, parties with whom you have a professional issue or complaint and third parties who you instruct us to communicate with on your behalf. We may also provide your data to third parties to whom we sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets.

We require all third parties to whom we transfer your data to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We only allow such third parties to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

  1. INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS

Countries outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) do not always offer the same levels of protection to your personal data, so European law has prohibited transfers of personal data outside of the EEA unless the transfer meets certain criteria.

Some of our third parties service providers are based outside the European Economic Area (EEA) so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we do our best to ensure a similar degree of security of data by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

  • We will only transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission; or

  • Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts or codes of conduct or certification mechanisms approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe; or

  • Where we use providers based in the United States, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the EU-US Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between the Europe and the US.

If none of the above safeguards is available, we may request your explicit consent to the specific transfer. You will have the right to withdraw this consent at any time.

Please email us at collinsaccountants@hotmail.com if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

  1. DATA SECURITY

We have put in place commercially reasonably and appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know such data. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

  1. DATA RETENTION

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

By law we have to keep data for six years after the conclusion of any engagement in order to comply our regulatory and tax obligations.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see below for further information.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for legal know-how, research or statistical purposes in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you.

  1. YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. These include:

  • The right to Access – you have the right to request a copy of the personal data that we hold about you, together with other information about our processing of that personal data.

  • The right to Rectification of your personal data – you have the right to request that any inaccurate data that is held about you is corrected, or if we have incomplete information you may request that we update the information such that it is complete.

  • The right to Erasure – you have the right to request us to delete personal data that we hold about you. This is sometimes referred to as the right to be forgotten.

  • The right to Object to processing and restrict processing – you have the right to request that we no longer process your personal data for particular purposes, or to object to our processing of your personal data for particular purposes.

  • The right to Data portability – you have the right to request us to provide you, or a third party, with a copy of your personal data in a structured, commonly used machine readable format.

9.         COMPLAINTS

If you are not happy with any aspect of how we collect and use your data, you have the right to complain to the Data Protection Commission (DPC), the Irish supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.dataprotection.ie).  Please contact us first if you do have a complaint so that we can try to resolve it for you.

10.       HOW TO CONTACT US

Please contact us if you have any questions about our data protection policy or information we hold about you.

By Email  : collinsaccountants@hotmail.com

Or by post to :  Jane Mangan, Managing Director, Connacht Accountancy Limited, Galway Technology Centre, Mervue Business, Galway.

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