Privacy Policy

TaxAid is a charity registered in England & Wales (No. 1062852).

TaxAid is a charity that helps people on low incomes when they get into difficulties with their tax affairs, providing free, independent and expert advice and help for people on lower incomes (£20,000 gross per annum or less).

Topics:

• What information do we collect about you?
• How will we use the information about you?
• Access to your information and correction
• Cookies
• Other websites
• Changes to our privacy policy
• How to contact us

What information do we collect about you?

At TaxAid UK we are committed to protecting your personal information and privacy.

When you engage with us by phone, mail, in person or online, we receive personal information about you. This information helps us understand you and your interests and allows us to improve our communications with you and increase the effectiveness of our organisation. We will never sell any of your personal information to any organisation for any reason.

We do, however, need to collect and use your personal information for carefully considered and business critical purposes, which helps ensure that TaxAid UK operates efficiently and can raise funds effectively in order to help us achieve our goals.

It is important that you read this policy carefully to understand what information we hold, how we may use it, and what your rights are.

What is personal information?

Personal information is data that can be used to help identify an individual, such as name, address, phone number or email address.

What is sensitive personal information?

Sensitive personal information is data that consists of racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, gender reassignment, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, data concerning health or data concerning an individual’s sex life or sexual orientation.

How will we use the information about you

Lawful processing

TaxAid UK will only collect and use your personal information when there is a lawful basis to do so. The law allows for six legitimate ways to process an individual’s personal information. However, only two of these ways to process an individual’s personal information are relevant to charities for the types of purposes we have listed below.

• Information is processed on the basis of a person’s consent.
• Information is processed on the basis of the “legitimate interests” of TaxAid UK.

We collect information from you when you contact us with a tax query and when you complete our online contact form. We also collect information when you voluntarily complete surveys, make a donation and provide feedback. Website usage information is collected using cookies.

The personal information we collect might include your name, postcode, email address and relevant information regarding your tax query.

Purposes

TaxAid UK may use your personal information to help us deliver our charitable mission to provide tax help to all who need it. We will always try to be as transparent and honest as possible regarding how we collect, use and store your personal information. Below we have summarised the different ways we may use your personal information, and our purposes for doing so.

Our lawful bases for processing your personal data are consent and legitimate interest, as collecting the data is necessary to fulfil our purpose as a tax advice charity and to assist you in dealing with your situation.

1. Delivery of charitable purpose

In order for us to process your information in a confidential manner, and to assist your query we will ask for your consent, and may need to take verbal consent over the phone.

We collect information about you to record details of your tax issues and the advice given. This is useful for us to keep so that we can give you the best support and advice, particularly if you call back or need further advice; it may involve sharing some information with colleagues so advice can be reviewed or for a second opinion. On occasion clients give us sensitive personal information and where this is relevant to our advice we include this on the record.

Information provided by you to your adviser will not be disclosed to anyone unconnected with TaxAid unless you have given your consent.  There are three exceptions:

• Where TaxAid has an overriding legal right or duty to disclose information. In particular, your adviser may have a legal duty under the Proceeds of Crime Act to report any suspicions of criminal activity to the appropriate authority.
• Where disclosure is necessary for the purposes of independent quality review or for our insurers.  Those involved are themselves required to keep the details confidential.
• Where we are seriously concerned about the well-being of a client.

If we need to share your details with a third party in order to deal with your tax problem, we will ask for your consent before doing so and will record this consent.

On occasion it will be necessary for advisers to take your papers and documents away with them. The underlying principle here is that all papers received or generated in the course of TaxAid’s work remain the property of the client and/or TaxAid and will be returned to you when the adviser has finished working with them.

Based on your marketing preferences we may contact you to provide information relevant to the delivery of our mission, such as information about our services or about tax issues that might affect you.

We will also process your personal information on the basis of legitimate interest to:

• Better understand the issues faced by our clients, including surveys and research.
• Understand how well we delivered the service and how we can improve.
• Understand the impact of our services.

When we use your personal information, we will always consider if it is fair and balanced to do so and if it is within your reasonable expectations. We will balance your rights and our legitimate interests to ensure that we use your personal information in ways that are not unduly intrusive or unfair.

We will only ask for the information we need. We always let you decide what you are comfortable telling us, explain why we need it and treat it as confidential.

We only access your information for other reasons if we really need to. For example:

• for training and quality purposes
• to investigate complaints
• to get feedback from you about our services
• to help us improve our services.

• Fundraising and marketing

Like all major charities, TaxAid UK undertakes a variety of fundraising and marketing activities which are aimed at raising income and/or awareness of the charity and its mission. Some of the channels we may use to market or fundraise are: face-to-face activity, post, advertising (print, broadcast, phone, SMS and digital) and promotional materials. We may communicate with you using these methods to promote TaxAid UK appeals, campaigns, trading, sponsorship, events, or volunteering opportunities and to ask if you are able to provide Gift Aid on any of your donations. We may also analyse the information we collect from you with the purpose of creating the best relationship with you and so that we can contact you in the most appropriate way and with the most relevant information.

We will process your personal information on the basis of legitimate interest, but TaxAid UK will only send you marketing and fundraising emails and text messages when we have your consent.

• Management of volunteers

If you volunteer for TaxAid UK, we may use some of your personal information to manage your volunteering activity, deliver training, update you on our campaigns and ensure your safety when volunteering for us. This could include sending you newsletters or information about our current fundraising activities or campaigns, so you can inform the public about us and our work. The legal basis for this processing is legitimate interest.

• Wealth screening and financial profiling

TaxAid UK does not undertake routine automated wealth screening or financial profiling of our supporter database. We would only ever undertake this kind of activity with your  consent.

However, there are times when key stakeholders who are in a position to give a very large gift would want TaxAid UK to research and present information on potential projects they are interested in. Where it is appropriate, we will ask for their consent to carry out more detailed research.

For prospective key stakeholders we may carry out research to determine if they may be interested in hearing about the services that we provide. The legal basis for this processing is legitimate interest.

• Staff administration

TaxAid UK processes the personal information of all our staff for recruitment, staff administration, remuneration, pensions, and performance management purposes. The legal basis for this processing is legitimate interest.

Consent

We will only collect and use your personal information and in some cases sensitive personal information in the ways we have laid out in this privacy policy. We will also ask for your consent if we wish to undertake any automated wealth screening unless it falls under the legitimate interest of the business. You can withdraw or update your consent at any time for any or all of our channels or activities by getting in touch with us.

Legitimate interest

When it may not be practical to get consent from an individual, TaxAid UK may still process personal information under legitimate interest. This is because the law allows personal information to be legally collected and used if it is in line with the legitimate business interest of the organisation. However, the processing of personal information still has to be carried out in a fair and balanced way that does not overly impact the rights of the individual concerned.

What are TaxAid UK’s legitimate interests?

• Governance
• The delivery of our charitable mission as set out in our charitable priorities
• Internal and external audit for financial or for regulatory compliance purposes
• Statutory reporting

Publicity and income generation

• Conventional marketing, publicity, advertising and fundraising
• Analysis, targeting, and segmentation of data to help develop organisational strategy and improve marketing and fundraising communication efficiency
• Processing for research purposes
• Using publicly available information to profile potentially important supporters

Operational management

• Monitoring and recording information on employees and volunteers for the purpose of recruitment, safety, performance management and planning procedures
• Provision and administration of staff benefits and learning and development opportunities
• Physical security, IT and network security
• Maintenance of suppression files
• Processing data for historical, scientific or statistical purposes

Financial management and control

• Processing of financial transactions and the maintenance of financial controls
• Preventing fraud, the misuse of our services, or money laundering
• Enforcing legal claims, including debt collection via out-of-court procedures

Administrative purposes

• Responding to any solicited enquiry from any of our supporters
• Providing products, information and/or fundraising packs requested by a stakeholder
• Communications designed to administer existing services that an individual has asked or registered for
• Administrating Gift Aid
• Thank you communications and receipts
• Administrating existing financial transactions

Maintenance of “do not contact lists”

Donations

To enable us to process direct donations (such as by standing order or direct debit) we may need to collect basic payment information from you. If you are eligible for UK Gift Aid, we may also ask you to confirm your UK home address.

When you are using our secure online donation pages such as Charities Aid Foundation, your donation is processed by a third party payment processor, who specialises in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions. If you have any questions regarding secure transactions, please contact us.

Access to your information and correction

We keep client records for a minimum of six years. You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If you would like a copy of some or all of your personal information, please email GDPR@taxvol.org.uk or write to us at this address.

GDPR
TaxAid
30 Monck Street
London
SW1P 2AP

There will be no charge for this service.

We want to make sure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. You may ask us to correct or remove information you think is accurate.

Cookies

Cookies are text files placed on your computer to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information. This information is used to track visitor use of the website and to compile statistical reports on website activity.

For further information visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the above websites tell you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, in a few cases some of our website features may not function as a result.

Other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites. This privacy policy only applies to this website, so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.

Changes to our privacy policy

We keep our privacy policy under regular review and we will place any updates on this web page. This policy was last updated on 21/11/23.

How to contact us

Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy policy or information we hold about you:

GDPR
TaxAid
30 Monck Street
London
SW1P 2AP

GDPR@taxvol.org.uk