Privacy Policy
Our service facilitates access to the HMRC gateways and various UK Government sites, for example to submit and track VAT returns, and as such we require you to supply various items of information as well as a valid email address and password for identification. Depending on your tax affairs some of this information may be considered personal, and for the purposes of complying with the UK-GDPR (Global Data Protection Requirements) legislation we observe the following principles.
We collect, hold and process all personal data in accordance with your rights and our obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998 and, from 01 January 2021, the UK General Data Protection Regulation ("UK-GDPR"), and we take appropriate steps to ensure that your information is protected consistent with the principles set out in the Act and the UK-GDPR, any other privacy laws and our Terms and Conditions, whether that information is held by us or shared by us with third parties.
Security
We keep the information you supply to use secure by encrypting it during transfer over communication networks using the https secure protocol and storing it in a recent version of a database from a leading software vendor, itself protected from direct fraudolent access by a strong encrypted password known only to the application and to administrators which are bound by confidentiality in their employment contract.
Protection
We protect the information you supply to us from inappropriate disclosure by asking you to confirm the email and the password you chose during registration in order to gain access to it, and limit access to end users just to the information they supply. We encrypt other application passwords as necessary and we review our access logs frequently to stop unauthorised access. We check the session user cookie (see Tracking below) for validity to ensure it cannot be used maliciously.
Use
Your personal information is limited to an email address and a password, which are used solely as a mechanism to authenticate your access to our service. The email address may also be used to communicate with you for support and to prevent fraud. Note that your email service provider may hold more information about you to which we do not have access. Any additional information you provide is gathered to simplify your access to the UK Government web applications, is optional and provided only as a reference for you to use, and we do not ask for nor store any passwords associated with such applications. We do not sell nor otherwise provide any information you supply to third parties, and we will always ask for your consent to do so prior to our policies changing in this respect.
You can verify the data we hold about you by logging on to the site, clicking on your registered email address and on the Personal Data page, and you can delete your profile in its entirety and cease using the service from the same page at any time. If after registration you do not access your account for more than a year your profile will be deleted automatically. We also reserve the right to delete any account that appears to be fraudolent or is used for denial of service attacks or hacking into our information technology platform.
Justification
The information you supply to us is optional, apart from a valid email address and a password used to authenticate your access and protect your data from unauthorised access we do not ask you to supply any other personal data, but the usefulness of our service becomes severly limited if you provide lesser amounts of information. In particular, if a business registered for VAT does not supply a VAT number they will not be able to use the VAT calculation and submission service. On the other hand, the same information for a company is deemed outside of the UK-GDPR regulations and can be freely supplied.
Tracking
For the purposes of offering a seamless use experience and avoiding having to re-enter your identification email and password we use a single cookie (the session cookie) to identify you after logging on, sent to your browser when you log in and returned automatically to the server automatically by whichever browser you use. This is an essential cookie that cannot be switched off, if you do not want this cookie to be stored you should not register for the service. Navigating to any of the public pages does not require any cookies so no consent is requested. If you log in with Google, Facebook or any other supported third party authentication service they will save a similar cookie that allows you to use the site without having to re-enter your password on every page.
We currently do not use other third party applications for advertising or marketing therefore there is no need for you to opt in to such services at any point. Should our policies change in this respect you will be prompted to opt in to any tracking technology that may be used by such providers.