privacy

What we collect,
and what we do with it.

We are a tax practice. Most of what you tell us is tax return information, which federal law treats more strictly than ordinary personal data — so this policy has a section that a typical website's does not.

Who we are

Abacus Tax Advisory, a dba of Abacus Tax & Accounting.
1101 South Winchester Blvd, Suite E-157, San Jose, CA 95128

Questions about this policy, or about data we hold on you: linda@abacustaxaccounting.com

What we collect

What you send us through this site. Your name, email address and whatever you write in the message field. Nothing on this site asks for a Social Security number, a bank detail, or a tax document — and you should not send one through a web form.
What you give us once you are a client. Returns, statements, entity documents and the rest of what a plan is built from. This is tax return information; see below.
Site usage. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views and basic visit information (the page, the referring site, the browser type). It does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you. Our host also keeps short-lived server records — IP address, browser, pages requested — for security and reliability.

Tax return information — federal and California law

Federal law (26 U.S.C. §7216, with penalties under §6713) makes it a criminal offence for a tax return preparer to disclose or use tax return information for any purpose other than preparing your return, without your written, informed consent obtained in advance. California law (Business and Professions Code §17530.5) separately prohibits a tax preparer from disclosing information obtained in preparing your return unless you consent in writing in a separate document, the law expressly authorizes it, it is necessary to prepare the return, or a court orders it.

So: we do not use your tax information to market anything to you, we do not share it with a third party for their own purposes, and we will not ask you to consent to either as a condition of being a client. Where a plan genuinely requires us to coordinate with your payroll provider, bookkeeper or attorney, we will ask you first, in writing, naming who and what.

As a tax practice, we are also a “financial institution” under the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. That law and the FTC Safeguards Rule require us to give clients a privacy notice and to protect client information under a written information security program.

Why we hold it

To answer the enquiry you sent.
To deliver the work you engaged us for, and to meet the record-keeping the IRS requires of us.
To keep the site working and secure.

Who processes it for us

These providers handle data on our behalf, under contract, and for no purpose of their own:

Conduit (GetDigital): The service that carries an enquiry from this form into the CRM. It holds the enquiry only in transit.
GoHighLevel: Our CRM — where an enquiry from this site arrives and where client correspondence is tracked.
Microsoft 365: Email and document storage.
Cloudflare: Hosting and delivery of this site, and the cookie-free Web Analytics described above.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Neither is a thing we have ever done, so there is no opt-out to offer.

How long we keep it

Enquiries that do not become engagements: 24 months, then deleted.
Client records: for as long as the IRS record-retention rules applicable to the return require, and no longer than our professional obligations support.

Your rights

Whether or not a particular privacy law applies to a practice our size, we honor these requests from anyone: to know what we hold about you, to have it corrected, and to have it deleted — subject to the records we are legally required to keep. Asking costs you nothing, and we will not treat you differently for it. Information we hold about clients is also covered by the federal and California rules above.

Write to linda@abacustaxaccounting.com. We will verify who you are before acting, because the alternative is handing your tax information to whoever asks for it.

Security

This site is served only over HTTPS, with a strict content security policy limiting what it can load. No method of transmission is perfectly secure; if you need to send us a document, ask us for a secure way to do it rather than attaching it to an email.

Do Not Track

This site does not track you across other websites, so a browser’s Do Not Track signal changes nothing about how it behaves.

Children

This site is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will post the new version here and change the date below.

Effective 2026-10-17 · Abacus Tax Advisory, a dba of Abacus Tax & Accounting

What we collect,and what we do with it.