BellchambersBarrett is committed to protecting your privacy in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. This Privacy Policy outlines how we collect, use, disclose, and protect your personal information.
The types of personal information we collect vary based on our interactions with you. Examples include:
- General identification details such as name, job title, occupation, and date of birth.
- Educational backgrounds, work history, salary details, and references.
- Payment information such as PAYG Payment Summaries, payslips, and additional income details, including employer and super fund summaries, bank and financial institution statements, employment termination summaries, and receipts for charitable donations and work-related expenses.
- Information from identification documents.
- Government-issued IDs, such as tax file numbers.
- Visa or work permit statuses.
- Immigration status information.
- Contact information including addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
- Usernames and passwords.
- Financial data, including credit card and bank account details, investment records such as shareholdings, dividend payments, and profit or loss from investments.
- Details about superannuation and insurance plans.
- In certain situations, we might need to collect sensitive information to provide specific services. This includes data regarding race, gender identity, sexual orientation, disabilities, health, religious or philosophical beliefs, and criminal history. We collect and use this information with your consent, in compliance with relevant laws.
You may also need to provide us with personal information about others, such as family members or employees. It is your responsibility to inform them that you are sharing their information with us, to explain how they can access this Privacy Policy, and to ensure you have the authority to share their information.
3. Collecting Information
BellchambersBarrett aims to only collect the personal or sensitive information we require to carry out our services and functions in any given instance. We obtain your personal information directly from you through various channels such as in-person interactions, phone conversations, email correspondence, completion of questionnaires, forms, or surveys, and when you subscribe to our publications. Additionally, we may collect your personal information from external sources, including publicly available information (such as social media posts on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter) and commercially available data related to personal, identity, geographic, and demographic information. This external data may also come from third parties, such as:
- Your employer or former employer
- Referees you have provided
- Your personal representatives
- Financial advisors
- Banks or other entities from which you have authorised disclosure
- Your Authorised Representative if you have one
- ASIC or other company registers
- Credit reports
Furthermore, we may gather personal information about you from your interactions with our websites, social media platforms, and information you submit through contact forms.
4. Maintaining Information
We maintain personal information in both physical and digital formats. In certain instances, we utilise third-party services to host electronic data, including information related to the services we offeri. Our security measures include physical safeguards, such as security passes for office access and secure storage of physical records in locked cabinets, as well as technological safeguards like access restrictions, firewalls, encryption, password protection, and digital certificates.
Additionally, we have established policies and procedures for document retention and managing data breach incidents. We strive to keep personal information up-to-date and to promptly delete or anonymise irrelevant or excessive data. However, we may retain some personal information for varying periods to comply with legal and regulatory requirements and for business purposes.
5. Why we Collect, Maintain, Use and Disclose Information
We will only use your information under lawful circumstances, such as fulfilling our legal obligations, with your consent, or when it serves our legitimate interests. This includes:
- Providing services to you or our clients as outlined in engagement letters, service agreements, or employment contracts, including payroll, tax, superannuation, and accounting services.
- Developing new products, responding to requests or inquiries, verifying identities, conducting surveys, and seeking feedback.
- Maintaining contact with clients and contacts to update them on services, industry developments, seminars, and events.
- Administrative purposes like processing payments, billing, fraud detection/prevention, and enforcing our terms and conditions.
- Employment-related purposes for our personnel, partners, clients’ personnel, contractors, and sub-contractors, including recruitment, pre-employment screening, background checks, and internal services or benefits.
- Governance and compliance, managing quality, conduct, risk management issues, meeting regulatory obligations, and compliance with legislation or industry standards.
- Development and analytics to enhance our expertise, including benchmarking, business intelligence, website performance analysis, quality assurance, and thought leadership.
We may also use non-personal, de-identified and aggregated information for several purposes including for data analytics, research, submissions, thought leadership and promotional purposes.
We may share your personal information with other parties including:
- Your authorised representatives, advisors and referees,
- Staff within BB and our professional advisors,
- Experts or other third parties contracted as part of an engagement,
- Our agents, third party contractors and suppliers that assist us with providing our business processes and products and services,
- Nominated superannuation funds,
- Other parties including government or regulatory bodies (for example, the Australian Taxation Office and the Australian Securities Investment Commission), professional or industry bodies or agencies, as part of an engagement or as required by or in accordance with any industry code or industry standard including foreign authorities or regulators relevant or applicable for the purposes of our provision of services, or
- Other parties when you ask us to do so or when you consent to that disclosure.
Where you are a customer, an employee, a contractor or supplier of services to one of our clients, then we may disclose your personal information as part of providing services to that client.
We do not disclose personal information to third parties for the purpose of allowing them to send marketing material to you. However, we may share non-personal, de-identified or aggregated information with select third parties for research, development, analytics or promotional purposes.
Automatic collection of personal information
In collaboration with our service providers, we employ cookies, web beacons, and other technologies on select websites and via email to automatically gather specific types of information. This data collection enables us to personalise and enhance your online experience. Additionally, we may utilise this information for development and analytical purposes. You have the option to customise your experience with these technologies through the privacy and browser settings on your device or by opting out of associated cookies.
Social media widgets and applications
- Certain websites and services include functionalities that enable sharing information through third-party social media applications, such as the Facebook Like button. These social media applications may gather and utilise information about your interactions with our content. Any personal information you provide through such social media applications may be collected and used by those applications’ providers independently of us and is governed by their respective privacy policies. We do not have control over, or responsibility for, these companies or their use of your information.
- Any personal information you share on any BB social media feature may be accessible to other users of that feature, unless otherwise specified at the time of collection, over whom we may have limited or no control.
We place importance on ensuring that the personal information we hold about you is accurate, up-to-date, and complete. If your details change or you believe any collected personal information is inaccurate, please contact us (via Section 12). We will take reasonable steps, in accordance with Privacy Act requirements, to correct it.
You have the right to request access to your personal information held by us. Please refer to section 12 for details on how to make a request. Reasonable costs may apply for providing access to your personal information.
If you have any complaints regarding our handling of your personal information, please notify us at feedback@bellchambersbarrett.com.au . Upon your initial contact, you will be requested to submit the details of your complaint in writing.
We will handle any complaint received in accordance with our feedback and complaints handling policy.
10. Contact BellchambersBarrett
If you have any questions in relation to this Privacy Policy or our management of your personal information you can contact our us on 02 6239 5011 and ask to speak to a Quality Partner or feedback@bellchambersbarrett.com.au.
Our outsourced service providers and cloud computing service providers include:
- Xero Practice Manager – our practice management system (based in United States)
- CaseWare Cloud – to store our audit working paper files (based in Australia)
- SharePoint – our firm’s internal record management system (based in Australia)
- Audit Dashboard – our information request management system (based in Canada)
- FYI Docs, Account Kit– our firm’s internal record management systems (based in Australia)
- ATOmate – our firm’s ATO document processing system (based in Australia)
- NowInfinity – our firm’s corporate compliance management system (based in Australia)
- Annature – our firm’s electronic signature provider (based in Australia)
- Sharesight & STM – our firm’s investment portfolio tracking software systems (based in Australia and United States)
- Odyssey Accountants – we may use a third-party provider to assist us in the preparation of your tax work (based in Vietnam).
- Seamless SMSF – We use a third-party provider to assist in the preparation of SMSF financial statement and tax return (based in Australia).
- Class – our firm’s SMSF administration system (based in Australia).