Collection of personal data
Our policy is to collect only the personal data necessary for agreed purposes and we ask our clients only to share personal data where it is strictly needed for those purposes.
Where we need to process personal data to provide our services, we ask our clients to provide the necessary information to other data subjects concerned, such as family members, regarding its use.
Given the diversity of the services we provide to personal clients (click here for information on our services), we process many categories of personal data, including as appropriate for the services we are providing:
- Contact details;
Business activities;
Family information;
Income, taxation and other financial-related details; and
Investments and other financial interests.
For certain services or activities, and when required by law or with an individual's explicit consent, we may also collect special categories of personal data. Examples of special categories include race or ethnic origin; political opinions; religious or philosophical beliefs; trade union membership; physical or mental health; genetic data; biometric data; sexual life or sexual orientation; and, criminal records.
Generally, we collect personal data from our clients or from a third party acting on the instructions of the relevant client.
Use of personal data
We use personal data for the following purposes:
- Providing professional services
We provide a diverse range of professional services (click here for information on our services). Some of our services require us to process personal data in order to provide advice and deliverables. For example, we need to use personal data to provide individual tax advice, immigration services or pensions advice.
- Administering, managing and developing our businesses and services
We process personal data in order to run our business, including:
- managing our relationship with clients;
- developing our businesses and services (such as identifying client needs and improvements in service delivery);
- maintaining and using IT systems;
- hosting or facilitating the hosting of events; and
- administering and managing our website and systems and applications.
- Security, quality and risk management activities
We have security measures in place to protect our and our clients’ information (including personal data), which involve detecting, investigating and resolving security threats. Personal data may be processed as part of the security monitoring that we undertake; for example, automated scans to identify harmful emails. We monitor the services provided to clients for quality purposes, which may involve processing personal data stored on the relevant client file. We have policies and procedures in place to monitor the quality of our services and manage risks in relation to client engagements. We collect and hold personal data as part of our client engagement and acceptance procedures.
As part of our client and engagement acceptance, we carry out searches using publicly available sources (such as internet searches and sanctions lists) to identify politically exposed persons and heightened risk individuals and organisations and check that there are no issues that would prevent us from working with a particular client (such as sanctions, criminal convictions (including in respect of company directors), conduct or other reputational issues).
- Providing our clients with information about us and our range of services
With consent or otherwise in accordance with applicable law, we use client contact details to provide information that we think will be of interest about us and our services. For example, industry updates and insights, other services that may be relevant and invites to events.
- Complying with any requirement of law, regulation or a professional body of which we are a member
As with any provider of professional services, we are subject to legal, regulatory and professional obligations. We need to keep certain records to demonstrate that our services are provided in compliance with those obligations and those records may contain personal data.
We are continually looking for ways to help our clients and improve our business and services. Where agreed with our clients, we may use information that we receive in the course of providing professional services for other lawful purposes, including analysis to better understand a particular issue, industry or sector, provide insights back to our clients, to improve our business, service delivery and offerings and to develop new PwC technologies and offerings. To the extent that the information that we receive in the course of providing professional services contains personal data, we will de-identify the data prior to using the information for these purposes.
Data retention
We retain the personal data processed by us for as long as is considered necessary for the purpose for which it was collected (including as required by applicable law or regulation).
In the absence of specific legal, regulatory or contractual requirements, our baseline retention period for records and other documentary evidence created in the provision of services is 10 years.
