Privacy Policy | Tax Pro Local

Last updated: this policy is reviewed and kept current as new features are added to the Tax Pro Local platform.

1. Introduction & Our Commitment to Openness

Tax Pro Local ("we", "us", "our", "the Site") operates a global accounting and tax firm directory and lead-generation marketplace. We built this Privacy Policy to be fully transparent about everything the website does with your information — not just the minimum legally required disclosures. If you can create it, upload it, message with it, or click a button related to it on Tax Pro Local, it is documented somewhere in this policy.

By using the Site in any capacity — as a visitor, registered customer, job seeker, firm owner, or firm staff member — you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy.

2. Who This Policy Covers

This policy applies to every category of person who interacts with Tax Pro Local:

Site Visitors — anyone browsing firm listings, blog articles, job postings, or location/service/industry pages without an account.
Customers / Consumers — registered users who search for accounting firms, submit lead/quote requests, leave reviews, or subscribe to our newsletter.
Job Seekers / Candidates — users who create a public Candidate Profile (resume) to apply for job postings listed by firms.
Firm Owners & Staff — accounting/tax/bookkeeping businesses that claim or create a firm listing, post jobs, respond to leads, or manage a subscription.
Administrators — Tax Pro Local staff who moderate content, manage settings, and operate the platform.

3. Information We Collect

3.1 Account & Registration Information

When you create an account we collect your name, email address, password (stored only as a salted cryptographic hash — we never store or can see your plaintext password), and account role (Customer, Firm Owner, or Admin).

3.2 Firm Listing Information

Firm owners provide (or we may source from publicly available business directories, subject to a claim/verification process): firm name, description, logo, cover photos, gallery images, physical address and service locations (country/state or province/city, down to towns and villages where applicable), phone number, website, social media profile links, service and industry categories, staff/team member profiles, credentials and certifications, pricing plan selection, and payment details for paid plans.

3.3 Lead / Quote Request Information

When you submit a request for quotes, we collect your name, email, phone number, location, the service category and business type you selected, your budget range, urgency, a free-text description of your needs, and any file you choose to attach. This information is shared with the accounting firm(s) your lead is routed to, according to the lead distribution rules (Free, Paid Credit, Paid Subscription, Exclusive, or Shared) configured by our administrators.

3.4 Candidate Profile & Resume Information (Job Seekers) — Public by Default

To apply for a job posting on Tax Pro Local, you must create a Candidate Profile — a public, professional, LinkedIn-style marketing profile designed to help you sell yourself to hiring firms. Your Candidate Profile can include: a professional headline and bio, a profile photo, an uploaded resume/CV file, an application letter (a general statement of why you are the best candidate, shown on your profile), your skills, total years of experience, work history, education history, your location (country/state/city), phone number, a public contact email, and links to your LinkedIn profile and online portfolio.

Work History detail: for each role you add, you may provide the employer name, job title, employment dates, a description of your responsibilities/achievements, and — entirely optionally — publicly available information about the employer itself that you choose to add, such as the company's website, street address, city/state/country, phone number, industry, and a short description of the company. We only ask for company details that are already publicly available information about the business (e.g. its public website or listed address) — never confidential employer data.

Education detail: for each entry you add, you may provide the school name, degree/program, field of study, dates attended, a description, and — entirely optionally — publicly available information about the institution, such as its website and address.

Your Candidate Profile, including your application letter and any employer/institution details you add to your Work History and Education entries, is PUBLIC BY DEFAULT. It is explicitly designed to function as a public marketing document (similar to a LinkedIn profile) and, unless you switch it to Private, is visible at a dedicated public URL to any visitor of the Site — not only to firms you have applied to. Before your profile can be saved as Public (the default), you must affirmatively check a box on the Candidate Profile page acknowledging that you understand this information will be public. You may switch your profile to Private at any time using the visibility toggle on your account dashboard, which removes your public profile page; you may also edit or delete individual entries, or your entire profile, at any time.

3.5 Job Application Information

When you submit a job application, we send your Candidate Profile (or the specific application details you provide: full name, email, phone, resume file, and cover letter) directly to the firm that posted the job. The firm can then track the status of your application (Submitted, Reviewed, Shortlisted, Interviewing, Offered, Hired, Rejected, or Withdrawn) and add internal notes visible only to their own staff.

3.6 In-App Messaging Between Candidates and Firms

Once you apply for a job, our platform enables direct, in-app messaging between you (the candidate) and the firm that posted the job, scoped specifically to that job application. This lets you discuss the role, schedule interviews, and receive updates without exchanging personal email addresses if you prefer not to. See Section 7 (Message & Application Data Retention) below for exactly how long these conversations are kept and when they are automatically and permanently deleted.

3.7 Reviews

When you leave a review of a firm, we collect your name (or display name), rating, written review text, and — where applicable — verification signals used to reduce fake reviews.

3.8 Payment Information

Firms purchasing paid subscriptions, lead credits, featured placements, or badges provide payment information processed through our supported payment gateways (which may include Stripe, PayPal, Square, Authorize.Net, Moneris, Braintree, and/or manual bank transfer, depending on what our administrators have enabled). We never store full credit card numbers on our own servers — card data is handled directly by the PCI-compliant payment processor; we only store the resulting transaction/subscription identifiers, plan selection, and billing status.

3.9 Automatically Collected Information

Like most websites, we automatically log: IP address, browser type and version, device/operating system, referring URL, pages visited, time spent on pages, and click events (e.g. "website_click" tracking when you click through to a firm's external website). We use cookies and similar technologies to support this — see our Cookie Policy for full detail and how to control them.

3.10 Newsletter & Contact Form Information

If you subscribe to our newsletter we store your email address and subscription status. If you use our Contact form we store your name, email, phone (optional), subject, and message.

4. How We Use Your Information

To create and manage your account and Candidate Profile.
To operate the firm directory and route lead/quote requests to matching firms.
To power the job board: publishing job postings, delivering applications and resumes to hiring firms, and enabling candidate–firm messaging.
To process payments for firm subscriptions, lead credits, featured placements, and badges.
To display reviews, ratings, and public Candidate Profiles to other visitors.
To send transactional emails (account confirmations, application status updates, message notifications, receipt confirmations) and, with your consent, marketing/newsletter emails.
To detect and prevent fraud, spam, and abuse (including spam-scoring on leads and honeypot fields on public forms).
To generate aggregated, de-identified statistics (e.g. total firm counts, total countries covered) shown publicly on the Site.
To comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Use.

5. Who We Share Information With

Firms you contact — your lead/quote request details, or your job application and Candidate Profile, are shared with the specific firm(s) you are requesting quotes from or applying to.
Other site visitors — content you choose to make public (your review, your public Candidate Profile if marked public, your firm listing) is visible to anyone browsing the Site.
Service providers who help us operate the Site, including hosting providers, transactional email delivery services, and payment processors (Stripe/PayPal/Square/Authorize.Net/Moneris/Braintree, as applicable).
Legal & safety — where required to comply with a legal obligation, protect the rights and safety of Tax Pro Local, our users, or the public, or investigate fraud.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties for monetary consideration.

6. Outbound Links & Nofollow Policy

Firm websites, job "Apply on Company Site" buttons, social media profile links, and links inside blog articles that point off our Site are, by default, marked with a rel="nofollow noopener" attribute so that visiting them does not pass search-engine ranking credit and does not expose our Site to unsafe cross-window scripting. Our administrators can, at their discretion, mark specific link categories as "dofollow" (for example, to properly credit a trusted editorial source in a blog post). This policy exists purely for search-engine and security hygiene and has no bearing on what data is shared with the destination site — clicking any outbound link takes you to a third party's website, which is governed by that third party's own privacy policy, not ours.

7. Message & Application Data Retention (Auto-Deletion)

We understand that job-search conversations are sensitive and that keeping them forever serves no one's interest. Our administrators configure a Message & Application Data Retention Period (in days) in the platform settings. Once a job application reaches a closed state (Hired, Rejected, or Withdrawn), the in-app messages exchanged between the candidate and the firm for that specific application are automatically and permanently deleted from our database once the configured retention period has elapsed since the application was closed. This deletion is performed by an automated scheduled housekeeping process and cannot be undone. Your Candidate Profile itself is not subject to this auto-deletion — it remains under your control in your account dashboard until you edit or delete it yourself, or until you request account deletion under Section 9 below. The firm's job posting and the high-level application record (status history) may be retained separately for the firm's own hiring records, consistent with the firm's own data retention practices and applicable law.

8. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies (including, where enabled by our administrators, Google Analytics) to operate the Site, remember your session and cookie preferences, and understand aggregate visitor behavior. See our full Cookie Policy for the categories of cookies we use and how to manage your preferences via our cookie consent banner.

9. Your Privacy Rights & Data Requests

Depending on your location, you may have rights under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the CCPA/CPRA, PIPEDA, or other applicable privacy laws, including the right to: access the personal information we hold about you; correct inaccurate information; request deletion of your information (including your account, Candidate Profile, resume, and messages); export your data in a portable format; object to or restrict certain processing; and opt out of marketing communications at any time via the unsubscribe link in any marketing email. See our dedicated GDPR Policy and CCPA/CPRA Policy pages for region-specific detail, or submit a request any time via our Contact page.

10. Data Security

We use administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect your personal information, including: salted/hashed password storage, encrypted sessions, role-based access control (Customer / Firm Owner / Admin permission tiers), file-type and file-size validation on all uploads (resumes, logos, gallery images, credential documents), and restricted admin-only access to payment gateway secret keys and SMTP credentials. No electronic transmission or storage system can be guaranteed 100% secure, but we continuously work to protect your information.

11. Children's Privacy

The Site is not directed to, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from, individuals under the age of 18. If we become aware that we have inadvertently collected personal information from a minor, we will delete it promptly.

12. International Data Transfers

As a global directory spanning many countries, your information may be processed and stored in a country other than the one in which you reside. Where required, we implement appropriate safeguards (such as Standard Contractual Clauses) for such transfers.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as our features evolve — for example, whenever we add new data-collecting functionality such as new profile fields, new messaging capabilities, or new payment gateways. The "Last updated" note at the top of this page reflects the most recent substantive revision. Continued use of the Site after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

14. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise any privacy right described above, contact us at support@taxprolocal.com or via our Contact page.