JAMES BYRNE & COMPANY ACCOUNTANTS LIMITED PRIVACY POLICY


1. WHO WE ARE AND CONTACT DETAILS

James Byrne & Company Accountants Limited is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. This statement (together with our General Terms and Conditions) sets out the basis on which any personal data we collected from and about you, or that you provide to us, will be processed by us. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practice regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

If you would like to contact us with any queries or comments in relation to your personal date please:

Send an email to: jamesbyrneco@eircom.net

Send a letter to:

  • Mallow Office: 25 Bank Place, Mallow, Co. Cork
  • Cork Office: Unit 4d, Blackpool Retail Park, Blackpool, Cork

Call us on:

  • Mallow Office: +353 22 21047
  • Cork Office: +353 21 4288888

James Byrne and Company Accountants is Joint Data Controllers with each individual client.

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 jamesbyrneco@eircom.net.

It is very important that the information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. Please let us know if at any time your personal information changes by emailing us at jamesbyrneco@eircom.net

2. 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. Our main services on which these guidelines may affect you is as follows:

Accounts preparations and bookkeeping services, audit assignments, corporate tax, personal tax, payroll services, corporate finance services, pensions and investments and insolvency and liquidation services.

You shall only disclose client personal data to us where, you have provided the necessary information to the relevant data subjects regarding its use (and you may use or refer to our privacy notice available at www.jamesbyrneco.ie for this purpose), you have a lawful basis upon which to do so, which, in the absence of any other lawful basis, shall be with the relevant data subject’s consent; and you have complied with the necessary requirements under the data protection legislation to enable you to do so.

We shall only process your personal data in order to provide our service, preform any other obligations in accordance with our engagement letter, to comply with our legal or regulatory obligation and when it is necessary for the purpose of our legitimate interests.

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, post, text, social media messaging, social media posting or any other communication that you send us. We process this data for the purposes of communicating with you, for record keeping and for the preparation and submission of statutory financial statements, relevant taxation returns, bookkeeping services (including payroll), audit services and other advice.
    Our lawful ground for this processing is to keep records and assist clients to fulfil their statutory obligations under taxation and other legislation.
  • Personal Contact Data includes data such as your name, title, address, email address, phone number, taxation number, salary information, financial information and contact details. We process this data to communicate with you, for record keeping and for the preparation and submission of statutory financial statements, relevant taxation returns, bookkeeping services (including payroll) and other advice. Our lawful ground for this processing is to keep records and assist clients to fulfil their statutory obligations under taxation and other legislation.
  • Transaction Data includes any data which you may provide to us in connection with services we provide. It also includes communication and other data generated in the course of the service. It also includes details about payments between us and other details of payments made by you and any bank account and payment card details submitted by you. We process this data to supply our services. Our lawful grounds for processing this data are the performance of a contract/engagement letter to which you are party and our legitimate interest in running our business.
  • Technical Data that includes data about your use of our website and online services such as your IP address, your login data, details about your browser, length of visit to pages on our website, page views and navigation paths, details about the number of times you use our website, time zone settings and other technology on the devices you use to access our website. The source of this data is from our analytics tracking system. We process this data to analyses your use of our website and other online services, to administer and protect our business and website, to deliver relevant website content and advertisements to you and to understand the effectiveness of our advertising. Our lawful ground for this processing is our legitimate interests which in this case are to enable us to properly administer our website and our business and to grow our business and to decide our marketing strategy.
  • Job Applicant Data includes any data submitted to us by prospective job applicants. Our lawful grounds for the processing of this data is for the purpose of the legitimate interests of our company in recruiting new staff.
  • 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.

In most respects there are no circumstances in which we will require information with this categories. However we may 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 you’re 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 in connection with the agreed engaged services

We process your data in order to comply with legal obligations to which we are subject, to perform the services you have requested of us or to take steps at your request prior to undertaking to provide services for you. We do this because you have consented to our processing of your data or for the purposes of our legitimate interests.

You are not obliged to provide us with your personal information. However, if you do not we might not be able to carry out the service you have requested of us

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.

3. 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 may site 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 authorize us to obtain the data from on your behalf (for example a government agency, revenue commissioners, financial institution or another professional or adviser).

We also collect data from publicly availably sources such as the Companies Registration Office and others.

4. MARKETING COMMUNICATIONS

Our lawful ground of processing your personal data to send you marketing communications is either by your consent or our legitimate interests (namely to grow our business).

Under the Data Protection Legislation, we may send you electronic marketing communications from us if (i) you made a purchase or asked for information from us about our goods or services or (ii) you agreed to receive marketing communications and in each case you have not opted out of receiving such communications since.

We will not share your personal data with any third party for their own marketing purposes without your express consent.

We may contact you by mail, email and telephone about our services and other events involving or in relation to James Byrne & Company Accountants Limited which may be of interest to you. You have the right to ask us to stop processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. You can request us to stop sending you marketing massages by post at any time emailing us at jamesbyrneco@eircom.net or by writing to us at 25 Bank Place, Mallow, Co. Cork.

5. DISCLOSURES OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below:

  • Service providers who provide IT and system administration services including cloud based
    services and applications
  • Service providers who provide business administration services, including third party dictation
    typing and transcription services and external file storage and archiving services.
  • Professional advisers including lawyers, accountants, bankers, taxation consultants, auditors
    and insurers who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services.
  • Risk management auditors and quality control companies.
  • The Revenue Commissioners, the Data Protection Commission, the Chartered Accountants
    Ireland, the Central Statistics Office and other regulators and authorities based in Ireland and other relevant jurisdictions who require reporting of processing activities in certain circumstances.
  • Third parties to whom we sell, transfer, or merge parts of our business or our assets.
  • Third parties to whom we outsource technical guidance and or data processing
  • 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.

6. WHERE WE STORE YOUR INFORMATION

We might store your information in different place. Physical files are store in our office and our archives. Electric files are mainly stored on our server and backed up an off store site located in the EEA. Our emails and other software are stored on secure servers in the cloud. We may transfer your data to, and store it at, a destination outside the EEA.

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.

You may contact us via e-mail, letter or telephone in case you wish to find out more or obtain a copy of the appropriate safeguards.

7. 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. We take our data security responsibilities seriously. 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.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information, including by e-mail, is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to or from us by means of e-mail and other means and any such transmission is at your own risk.

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.

8. 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 from the date of filing the taxation returns in respect thereof in order to comply our regulatory and tax obligations. Consequently we keep your information for seven and a half years after the conclusion of any matter.

Where you have requested information from us or where we have done business with you we will retain your Personal Contact Data for these minimum periods and for as long as you wish us to remain in contact with you thereafter.
In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see below for further information.

9. YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

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

  • Request access to your personal data.
  • Request correction of your personal data.
  • Request erasure of your personal data.
  • Object to processing of your personal data.
  • Request restriction of processing your personal data.
  • Request transfer of your personal data.
  • Right to withdraw consent.
  • You can see more about these rights at: www.dataprotection.ie

By consenting to this privacy notice you are giving us permission to process your personal data for the purposes identified.

If we are processing personal data based on your consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time. This does not affect the lawfulness of processing which took place prior to its withdrawal.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please email us at jamesbyrneco@eircom.net You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

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.

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—
a competent authority that, whether alone or jointly with others, determines the purposes and means of the processing of personal data, or 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 20181 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—
an identified living individual, or
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 the collection, recording, organisation, structuring or storing of the data, the adaptation or alteration of the data, the retrieval, consultation or use of the data, the disclosure of the data by their transmission, dissemination or otherwise making the data available, the alignment or combination of the data, or the restriction, erasure or destruction of the data;

“Special Categories of Personal Data” means— 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, genetic data, biometric data for the purposes of uniquely identifying an individual, data concerning health, or personal data concerning an individual’s sex life or sexual orientation.