Privacy Policy

1. The short version

2. Who this covers

This policy applies to TrueArc Tax and Financial Services LLC, to truearctax.com, and to the information we handle in the course of the practice. It covers three groups: people who visit the site, people who contact us or book a consultation, and clients under a signed engagement.

It does not cover what other companies do with information you give them directly. Where we use an outside service, that is named below, and their own policy governs their handling.

3. What we collect

From anyone who visits the site

Standard web server and analytics data: pages viewed, time on page, referring site, approximate city-level location, device type, browser, and a truncated IP address. This is aggregate measurement. It is not tied to a name, and we make no attempt to identify individual visitors from it.

From the free calculators

The Entity Selection Wizard and the Deduction Finder are ungated. Neither requires an email address, a name, or an account. The figures you enter are used to produce the result on your screen. If you choose to have the summary emailed to you, we use that address to send that one message and for nothing else.

From the contact form and the booking page

Through the form: your name, email address, phone number if you give one, your business structure, the topic you selected, what you wrote about your situation, and how you found us. The form also carries a hidden spam check that no human ever reads.

Through the booking page: your name, email, phone, and whatever you type into the scheduling fields. Booking runs on Calendly, an outside scheduling service, which processes that information under its own privacy policy and sends us the appointment.

From clients

Everything a return requires, which is a great deal: Social Security or taxpayer identification numbers for you, your spouse, and your dependents; dates of birth; addresses and contact details; wage, business, investment, retirement, and rental income records; bank and brokerage information; bank routing details where you elect direct deposit or direct debit; entity formation and election documents; payroll reports; prior year returns; accounting records and QuickBooks Online data; and correspondence from the IRS or the FTB.

We collect it because a return cannot be prepared without it, and we do not ask for more than the work requires.

4. Cookies, analytics, and tracking

The site uses Google Analytics 4 to measure traffic: which pages are read, how visitors arrive, and whether the site works on their device. It sets first-party cookies to distinguish one visit from another. You can opt out across all sites with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, or block cookies in your browser. Nothing on this site stops working if you do.

WordPress, which the site runs on, sets a small number of functional cookies. The Calendly scheduling embed sets its own cookies, and only on the booking page, and only when that page loads.

What this site does not run: no advertising or remarketing pixels, no Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, or X tags, no third-party ad networks, no cross-context behavioral advertising, no session recording or heatmapping, no fingerprinting, and no data broker integrations of any kind.

Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. There is still no industry standard defining how a site should answer a Do Not Track header, so this site does not respond to one. Global Privacy Control signals an opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, from any browser, with or without the signal, so there is nothing for it to switch off.

5. How we use it

• To prepare, review, and electronically file your tax returns, and to advise you on them.
• To perform bookkeeping, formation, and entity election work under your engagement.
• To answer you when you contact us, and to schedule and hold a consultation.
• To send the deliverables an engagement calls for, including estimated payment schedules, salary and retirement memos, and your year-end review materials.
• To issue quotes, engagement letters, and invoices, and to collect payment.
• To meet our own legal obligations as a paid preparer, an authorized e-file provider, and a California business, including record retention.
• To keep the site working and understand which pages are useful.

We do not use your information to build a marketing profile, to score you, or to feed an advertising system. We do not use client information to train machine learning models, and we do not put client data into general-purpose AI tools.

6. Tax return information is treated differently

Section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code makes it a federal crime for a tax return preparer to disclose or use your tax return information for any purpose other than preparing that return, unless you have signed a consent that meets specific IRS requirements. Section 6713 adds a civil penalty on top.

Those consents exist mostly so that preparers can market other products to you, or sell your information onward. We do not ask you to sign one, because we have nothing to do with it. Your return information is used to prepare and file your returns and to give you advice about them. Nothing else.

The narrow exceptions we would ever rely on are the ones the law itself provides: disclosure you specifically direct in writing, such as sending your return to your lender or your attorney; disclosure required by a valid court order, subpoena, or lawful government request; and disclosure to the IRS or the FTB in the course of filing, which is the entire point of the engagement.

7. Who sees it, and who never does

Inside the practice, one person handles your file, start to finish. There is no preparation pool, no review layer, and no administrative staff with a login.

Outside the practice, information reaches only these:

• Tax authorities, when we file your returns and correspond on them at your direction.
• Software and infrastructure providers under contract, which is unavoidable for any modern practice: professional tax preparation software, QuickBooks Online under a subscription in your own name, the secure client portal, our website host, our email delivery provider, Calendly for scheduling, and Google Analytics for site measurement. Each is bound to use the information only to provide its service to us.
• People you tell us to send it to, on your written instruction: a lender, an attorney, a banker, a new accountant.
• Where the law compels it, through a valid subpoena, court order, or regulatory inquiry. Where we are permitted to tell you first, we will.

Never, in any circumstance: sold, rented, bartered, or traded. Never disclosed to an advertiser, a data broker, a lead generator, or a lending or insurance marketer. Never sent to an offshore preparation service. Never used to train an outside company's models.

If the practice were ever sold or merged, client files would transfer only as part of that transaction, only to a party bound by these same commitments and by section 7216, and clients would be told before anything moved.

8. How we protect it

As a paid tax preparer, this practice is a financial institution under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and is subject to the FTC Safeguards Rule. We maintain a written information security plan of the kind that rule and IRS Publication 4557 require, and review it annually.

• Encryption in transit on every connection to this site and to the client portal, and encryption at rest on the devices and systems that hold client data.
• Multi-factor authentication on every system that touches client information, including tax software, the portal, accounting software, and email.
• Documents exchanged only through the secure portal. Not by plain email, and not through the contact form.
• Access limited to the advisor performing your work. No shared logins.
• Full-disk encryption and automatic locking on every device used for the practice. No client data on removable drives or personal cloud storage.
• An incident response plan, and notification to affected individuals and to the California Attorney General as required by California's breach notification law if a breach of unencrypted personal information ever occurred.

What no one can honestly promise is perfect security. What we can tell you is that this practice is deliberately built small, on a short list of reputable systems, with the fewest hands and the fewest transfer points that competent work allows.

9. Where the work happens

All preparation, review, bookkeeping, and advisory work is performed in the United States, by the advisor named on this site. No part of your return is sent to an overseas preparation service, and no offshore contractor has access to your file. This is one of the reasons the practice is priced the way it is, and it is not something we would trade for a margin.

10. How long we keep it

• Tax returns and the records supporting them: at least seven years after filing. Federal and California law require a preparer to retain them, and the longer window covers the periods in which a return can still be examined or amended.
• Bookkeeping records and accounting files: for the term of the engagement plus seven years. Your own QuickBooks Online file stays with you indefinitely, because the subscription is in your name.
• Engagement letters, quotes, and invoices: seven years, as ordinary business records.
• Contact form messages and consultation notes where no engagement followed: up to twenty-four months, then deleted.
• Calculator email requests: the message is sent and the address is not retained for any further purpose.
• Website analytics: aggregate and non-identifying, on the analytics provider's retention schedule.

11. Your rights, and how to use them

You can ask us, at any time, to tell you what information we hold about you, to give you a copy of it, to correct anything inaccurate, or to delete what we are not required to keep. You can also ask us to stop contacting you. There is no charge for any of this and nothing about your engagement changes because you asked.

Two honest notes on the limits, because most privacy pages leave them out:

• Some records cannot be deleted on request. Federal and California law require a preparer to retain copies of prepared returns and supporting records. A deletion request cannot override a retention obligation, and we will tell you specifically what we are keeping and why.
• Formal CCPA obligations do not currently attach to a practice this size. The California Consumer Privacy Act applies to businesses meeting revenue or data-volume thresholds this one does not meet, and it separately exempts most information collected under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which covers nearly everything a tax practice holds. We honor these requests anyway, on the same timelines the statute sets, because the right answer does not depend on whether we are compelled to give it.

To make a request, email contact@truearctax.com, call (818) 297-4579, or write to the address below. We verify identity before releasing or changing anything, which for a client normally means confirming details already in your file. Expect a response within forty-five days; if a request is complex we may take up to forty-five more and will tell you before we do.

12. Children

This site is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under thirteen through it. We do handle information about minor children in the ordinary course of a return, because dependents appear on their parents' filings. That information is provided by the parent or guardian and is protected exactly as the rest of the return is.

13. Other sites we link to

This site links out to the IRS, the Franchise Tax Board, CTEC, Yelp, and other outside resources. Those sites are not under our control and are governed by their own privacy policies. A link is a pointer, not an endorsement of how the destination handles your data.

14. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the revised version is posted here with a new date at the top. If a change materially affects how client information is handled, active clients are told directly rather than left to notice a date change.