Privacy Policy

FARO TAX LLC is a limited liability company registered in the State of Wyoming, United States. In this policy, “FARO”, “we”, “us” and “our” mean FARO TAX LLC. “You” means the person whose information we hold: a visitor to our site, someone who books a consultation or downloads a guide, a client, or a person connected to a client, such as a co-owner, a director or an authorized user of an account.

FARO is the controller of the personal information described here, which means we decide why and how it is used. Our contact details are in section 15.

Information you give us

• Identity and contact information. Name, email address, phone number, country of residence, mailing address, date of birth, nationality and preferred language.
• Identity documents. Passport, national identity document, U.S. visa, driver’s license, and for ITIN work the original or certified documents we must verify as a Certifying Acceptance Agent.
• Tax identification numbers. SSN, ITIN, EIN and foreign tax identification numbers.
• Tax and financial information. Income, expenses, bank and brokerage account details, foreign account balances for FBAR purposes, cryptocurrency activity, real estate, prior tax returns, IRS and state notices, and the supporting documents behind all of it.
• Company information. Entity name, state, formation documents, operating agreements, ownership structure, officers and members, registered agent details, and the same information about people connected to the company.
• Account and portal information. Login credentials, the documents you upload, your messages to us and the people you authorize to access your account.
• Payment information. Billing name and address, invoice history and the last four digits of your card. Our payment provider processes the payment and holds the full card number; we do not store it.
• Anything else you choose to send us. Consultation notes, emails, WhatsApp messages, survey answers, quiz results and feedback.
• Consultation recordings and transcripts. If you agree, we record and transcribe consultations with an AI notetaker to prepare your quote and keep an accurate record.

Information we collect automatically

When you visit the site or use the portal we collect IP address, approximate location derived from it, device and browser type, operating system, language, referring page, pages viewed, time on page, and the actions you take. We collect this through cookies and similar technologies, described in section 9.

Information from other sources

• Government and public sources. Secretary of State records, IRS transcripts and notices when you authorize us to obtain them, and public business registries.
• Your service providers. Registered agents, banks and payment platforms, when you ask them to communicate with us or when they confirm the status of something we handled for you.
• Referrals and partners. If someone refers you to us, we receive your name and contact details and what they told us about your situation.
• Our tools. Scheduling, e-signature, accounting and analytics platforms return information about your interactions with them.

Information about other people

When you give us information about someone else, for example a co-owner, a spouse, a dependent or an employee, you confirm that you are entitled to share it and that the person knows it is being shared with us for the purposes described here. We treat that information under this policy.

Sensitive information

Some of what we handle is sensitive by nature: government identification numbers, identity documents, financial account information and, for FBAR and foreign asset reporting, account balances. We collect it only because the filing requires it, we limit internal access to the people who need it, and we do not use it for anything other than the purposes in section 3.

We do not seek information about your health, religion, political opinions, sexual orientation or union membership beyond what a filing requires. Some filings do require part of it, for example medical expenses claimed as deductions, health coverage forms or disability-related credits. When that happens, we use it only for that filing and for nothing else.

The “why” column names a legal basis under the GDPR and similar laws. If none of those laws applies to you, read it simply as the reason we use the information.

We do not use your information to make decisions about you by automated means alone that produce legal or similarly significant effects.

Your tax return information is protected by Internal Revenue Code section 7216 and its regulations, which apply to tax return preparers specifically and are stricter than general privacy rules. Under those rules:

• We may use and disclose your tax return information to prepare your return and to perform auxiliary services connected to it, without separate consent.
• For any other use or disclosure, we need your written consent, signed and dated before the use or disclosure happens.
• Each consent is a separate document with the wording the IRS requires. A consent cannot be bundled into these policies, into our Terms of Service or into an engagement letter, and we cannot make our services conditional on you signing one, except in the limited case the regulations allow.
• Where a consent does not state a period, it lasts one year from the date you sign it.

As a tax preparer, FARO is a financial institution under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and this policy is our privacy notice under that law. We give it to you when you become a client, and we will give you a new one if we change how we share your information.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own marketing.

We share it with:

• Our team. Employees and contractors who need it to do the work, under confidentiality obligations and with access limited to what their role requires.
• Government agencies. The IRS, state tax departments, Secretaries of State, FinCEN and, where relevant, other agencies, when we file on your behalf under the authorizations you sign.
• Service providers. The companies that run our systems. They act on our instructions, under contracts that require confidentiality and security, and they may not use your information for their own purposes. Section 6 lists the categories.
• Banks, registered agents and other third parties you engage. Only what is needed for the step you asked us to handle, and where required, with your consent.
• Your other advisers. Your attorney, your local accountant or anyone else you ask us to coordinate with, at your request.
• Professional advisers and insurers of FARO. Our own lawyers, accountants and insurers, where necessary to defend or advise the firm.
• A buyer or successor. If the business or part of it is transferred, your information may transfer with it, subject to this policy and to the consent rules that apply to tax return information. We will tell you if that happens.
• Authorities, when the law requires it. In response to a valid subpoena, court order, regulatory request or legal obligation. Where we are allowed to tell you, we will.

Last updated: [date].

FARO is a U.S. company and our systems are mainly hosted in the United States. Part of our team, including people who work on client files, works from outside the United States, and some of our service providers process information in other countries.

This matters in two ways:

• Under U.S. tax law. When your tax return information will be disclosed to a person located outside the United States, U.S. rules may require your written consent before it happens. Where that applies, we ask for it in a separate document during onboarding, and we explain what it covers. U.S. rules also restrict sending your Social Security number to a preparer outside the United States unless both preparers maintain an adequate data protection safeguard. We maintain one, and the consent we ask you to sign says so.
• Under European and similar laws. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, your information is processed in the United States and in the countries where our team and providers work. Our providers process it under contracts that include the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses or an equivalent mechanism, and where we transfer information ourselves we rely on those clauses or on the transfer being necessary to perform our contract with you.

If you are in Argentina, Law 25.326 and its rules on international transfers apply to information about you.

When a retention period ends, we delete the information or make it anonymous. Some copies may remain in backups for a limited period before being overwritten, during which they are not used for any purpose.

Cookies are small files placed on your device. We use:

• Essential cookies, which keep the site and the portal working, remember your session and protect against fraud. These run without your consent because the service cannot work without them.
• Analytics cookies, which tell us which pages are read, how people arrive and where they leave. We use them to decide what to write and what to fix.
• Marketing cookies, if we use them, which measure the performance of our campaigns and may allow a platform to show our content to people with similar interests.

Analytics and marketing cookies run only where you allow them, through the banner shown on your first visit. You can change your choice at any time from Cookie settings in the footer. Your browser also lets you block or delete cookies, although blocking essential cookies will break parts of the site. The full list of cookies, their purpose and their lifetime is in our Cookie Policy.

We do not sell personal information. If we use advertising cookies, they run only with your consent, you can withdraw it at any time from Cookie settings, and we honor the Global Privacy Control signal where the law requires it.

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can:

• ask us what information we hold about you and get a copy;
• ask us to correct information that is wrong or out of date;
• ask us to delete information, which we will do unless we must keep it for a filing, a legal obligation or a legal claim;
• unsubscribe from the newsletter using the link in every email, which does not stop the service messages connected to your engagement; and
• ask us questions about how we handle your information and expect a real answer.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you also have the right to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, to receive the information you gave us in a portable format, and to withdraw consent at any time without affecting what we did before. You can complain to your national data protection authority.

If you are in California, whether or not the California Consumer Privacy Act applies to us, you can know what we collect and why, access and delete your information, correct it, limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell personal information. You can use an authorized agent.

If you are in another U.S. state with a privacy law, the rights above apply to you in the form that state’s law provides, including the right to appeal a decision we make about your request.

How to make a request

Write to admin@farotax.com from the email address we have for you, or through the portal. We may need to verify your identity before we act, especially when the request concerns tax or financial information. We respond within 30 days, and we will tell you if we need longer. There is no charge unless a request is clearly excessive or repetitive.

Two limits are worth knowing in advance. First, we cannot delete information we are required to keep, such as a copy of a return we filed for you. Second, tax return information has its own rules, so we may need a signed consent before we can send it somewhere else, even at your request.

We maintain a written information security plan, as U.S. law requires of tax professionals under the FTC Safeguards Rule, with a named person responsible for it. Our safeguards include encryption of information in transit and at rest on the systems that hold client data, access limited by role, multi-factor authentication on those systems, confidentiality agreements for everyone who works on client files, contractual security requirements for our service providers, secure disposal of documents, and a periodic review of the plan by the person responsible for it.

Please do not send documents with tax identification numbers or identity documents by plain email or by messaging apps. Use the portal, which is there for that reason.

No system is perfectly secure. If a security incident affects your information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as the law requires, and tell you what happened and what to do.

Our site and services are meant for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13, or under 16 where local law sets that age, except information that a parent or guardian gives us as part of a family’s tax filing, such as a dependent’s name and tax identification number. If you believe a child has given us information directly, write to us and we will delete it.

Our site links to government pages, banks, partners and other resources. Those sites have their own privacy policies, and this one does not apply to them. We suggest reading theirs before giving them your information.

We may update this policy. When we do, we post the new version here with a new effective date and, for material changes, notify clients by email or through the portal. Changes apply from their effective date. Where a change requires your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.

Privacy questions are welcome and we answer them ourselves. Questions about your own tax situation are what the Consultation is for.