What's in here
This policy explains how Filed Tax looks after your personal information when you use our website and our service. It sits alongside our Terms & Conditions.
1.Who's responsible for your data
The "data controller" for your information is Gazelle Accountancy Ltd (company number 17128689), trading as Filed Tax, of Office 63GA, 321–323 High Road, Chadwell Heath, Greater London, RM6 6AX. We're registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) under reference [ICO registration number].
If you have any questions about your data, email us at trevor@filedtax.co.uk. [If a Data Protection Officer or named data contact is appointed, add their details here.]
2.What we collect
To prepare and file your tax, we collect:
- Who you are — name, date of birth, address, National Insurance number, Unique Taxpayer Reference (UTR), and the ID documents we need to verify you (for example a passport or driving licence).
- How to reach you — email, phone number and contact preferences.
- Your tax and financial information — income, expenses, property and rental details, capital gains, bank and transaction details you share with us (including through open banking, if you choose to connect it), receipts, invoices and any documents you send.
- Your correspondence — the questions you ask us and our answers, and other messages between us.
- Payment details — handled by our payment providers (see section 5); we don't store full card or bank-mandate details ourselves.
- Website and usage data — basic technical information such as your device and how you use the site (see Cookies).
Some of this is "special category" or sensitive information. We only collect what we need to do your tax properly.
3.Why we use it, and our legal basis
Under UK data-protection law we must have a lawful basis for using your information. Ours are:
- To provide the service you've signed up for — preparing, checking and filing your submissions, answering your questions, and taking payment. Basis: performance of our contract with you.
- To meet our legal duties — filing with HMRC, and identity and anti-money-laundering checks and record-keeping the law requires. Basis: legal obligation.
- To run and improve our service — keeping records, preventing fraud, and getting in touch about your account. Basis: our legitimate interests, balanced against your rights.
- To send you marketing — only where you've agreed. Basis: consent (you can withdraw it any time).
4. Automated tools and human review
We use software — including AI-assisted tools — to help organise your information, draft answers to your questions, and prepare your submissions more quickly. This helps us keep the service simple and affordable.
Where a business name appears on a bank or card statement you send us, we may look up that business's public identity (for example its trading name) using an AI-assisted web search, so your records are described accurately; only the merchant's printed name is ever used in the lookup — never your name, your account details or any amounts — and the result is kept in our own directory so the same business need not be looked up twice.
A real person always reviews your return before it's filed. We don't make solely-automated decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Any guidance our tools produce is checked by us before anything is relied on or submitted — as explained in our Terms.
5.Who we share it with
We never sell your data. We share it only with those who help us deliver the service, and where the law requires:
- HMRC — to file your submissions and deal with your tax affairs.
- Our payment providers — GoCardless (Direct Debit) and Stripe (card payments), to collect your fees. They handle your payment and bank-mandate details directly, and we don't store those details ourselves.
- Our identity-verification provider — ChecksAreUs, to confirm your identity and carry out the anti-money-laundering checks the law requires.
- Our messaging providers — WhatsApp, provided by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, and our email provider, so we can communicate with you about your tax. We only message you on WhatsApp where you've asked us to — see "Marketing and messaging" below.
- Our technology providers — Google (Google Workspace: our email, secure document storage and client-record system) and Anthropic (the Claude AI tools we use to help organise your information and draft answers, as described in section 4). Our website is hosted on UK-based servers provided by [hosting provider], and we prepare and file your submissions using recognised tax software [name of filing software].
- The person who reviews your return — Robert Webb, who checks your submission before filing.
- Professional and legal bodies — where we're legally required to disclose, or to take professional advice.
Everyone we share your data with is required to keep it secure and use it only for the purpose we've asked them to.
Transfers outside the UK. Most of your information stays in the UK. Some of our providers — in particular WhatsApp / Meta (messaging) and Anthropic (the AI tools in section 4) — may process data on servers outside the UK, including in the United States. Where that happens, we make sure your data is protected by an approved safeguard, such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with additional protections where they're needed. [Confirm the specific transfer mechanism each such provider relies on.]
6.Where it's stored
Your records are held in a secure, access-controlled system hosted in the UK. We protect your information with appropriate technical and organisational measures, including encryption in transit and at rest, and we limit access to those who need it to do your tax.
7.How long we keep it
We keep your information for as long as you're a client and afterwards for as long as the law requires. In particular, anti-money-laundering rules require us to keep identity and transaction records for five years after our relationship ends, and tax records are kept in line with HMRC's requirements. When we no longer need your data, we delete or anonymise it securely.
8.Your rights
Under UK data-protection law you have the right to:
- ask for a copy of the information we hold about you;
- ask us to correct anything that's wrong;
- ask us to delete it, or restrict how we use it, in certain circumstances;
- ask for your data in a portable format;
- object to certain uses; and
- withdraw consent where we relied on it (for example, marketing).
Some of these rights are limited where we have a legal duty to keep your records (for example, tax and anti-money-laundering rules). To exercise any right, email trevor@filedtax.co.uk. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the ICO at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113 — though we'd appreciate the chance to put things right first.
9.Cookies
Our website uses cookies to make it work and to understand how it's used. [Add or link a full cookie list/notice; state whether analytics or non-essential cookies are used and how consent is obtained.] You can control cookies through your browser settings.
10.Marketing and messaging
We communicate with you by email and, where you've opted in, by WhatsApp — for example to remind you when information or a deadline is due, to confirm a filing, or to answer your questions. These are service messages about your account and your filings, and we'll send them as we need to in order to run your service.
We'll only send you marketing — news, offers or tips that aren't about your own account — if you've separately agreed to it. You can opt out of marketing at any time, using the unsubscribe link in our emails, replying STOP to a WhatsApp marketing message, or contacting us, without affecting the service messages we still need to send you. You can also change how we contact you, or ask us to stop using WhatsApp, at any time.
Messaging you on WhatsApp
WhatsApp messaging with Filed Tax (Gazelle Accountancy Ltd) is optional and always something you choose. We'll only message you on WhatsApp once you've given us your mobile number and opted in — for example by ticking the WhatsApp option when you sign up, or by messaging us first. When you opt in, we tell you it's Filed Tax you'll hear from and the kinds of messages you'll get:
- Service and utility messages — reminders that information or a deadline is due, requests for documents, confirmations that we've filed, and answers to the questions you ask us; and
- Marketing messages — only if you've separately agreed to these (see above).
WhatsApp is provided by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited. When you message us on WhatsApp, your phone number and the content of your messages are also processed by WhatsApp/Meta under WhatsApp's own Privacy Policy, and WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted between you and us. We only use the information we get through WhatsApp to message you in connection with your tax and our service to you — we don't use it for anything else. Because WhatsApp/Meta may process data outside the UK, this involves an international transfer protected by an approved safeguard (see section 5).
You can opt out of WhatsApp at any time — reply STOP, ask us to switch you to email, or contact us at trevor@filedtax.co.uk — and we'll stop messaging you there. Opting out of WhatsApp won't stop the essential service messages we're still required to send you by another channel, such as email.
11.Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. If we make an important change, we'll let you know and update the date at the top of this page.
12.How to contact us
For anything about your privacy or this policy, email trevor@filedtax.co.uk or write to us at Gazelle Accountancy Ltd, Office 63GA, 321–323 High Road, Chadwell Heath, Greater London, RM6 6AX.
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