Privacy notice

Advisory work runs on written material. A question arrives, papers are read, people are spoken to and a report goes back — each of those steps leaves a record behind it. This notice describes those records and the company's handling of them.

/scope

SIRM Consulting Ltd advises organisations on the systems they run on. Personal information reaches the company along two routes: through consultancy — enquiries, engagement papers and the correspondence surrounding them — and through the property interests the company holds and deals in on its own account, where counterparties and their advisers write to it directly.

/collected

An enquiry brings a name, an employer, a return address and an account of the situation prompting the approach. An engagement adds the agreed scope, the exchanges that follow it, notes taken while talking to the people who run the systems under review, the evidence assembled, and the report finally issued. A finding carries an attribution to its source, since a conclusion has to be traceable if it is to survive being challenged.

Documents opened during a review — contracts, system configurations, operating records — commonly carry personal information about a client's employees, customers and suppliers. That body of material stays the client's throughout, moves on the client's instructions, and serves the piece of work it was released for.

/purpose

The records support five things: answering approaches, running engagements, standing behind reports after delivery, billing for the work, and holding the books a limited company keeps. Correspondence attached to a property matter serves the conduct of that transaction.

/basis

Client work proceeds on the engagement agreement itself. Replying to an approach, running the practice and keeping a record firm enough to defend later advice rest on the company's legitimate interests. Accounting and statutory books exist because company law requires them. A property matter proceeds on the contract and on the legal steps the transaction calls for.

/confidentiality

Engagement material stays inside the engagement it belongs to. It informs the report written for that client and stops there; naming a piece of work elsewhere waits on the client's written agreement.

/recipients

Within the company, the person carrying out the engagement reads the file. Beyond it, the company's accountant sees what the accounting records require, professional advisers and insurers see a matter referred to them, and a property transaction brings in the solicitors, agents and counterparties it needs. Anything further passes only where the law compels the company to hand it over.

/site

These pages are static files, served exactly as written. The copy control beside the advisory address passes that address to your browser's own clipboard and finishes on your device. Everything a page needs in order to render travels with the page itself.

/retention

An engagement file, report and underlying evidence together, remains available while the advice inside it can still be questioned, and is destroyed once that window closes. Accounting material runs to the statutory term set for company books. Papers from a property matter follow the span the transaction and the title call for. An approach that closes without an engagement is cleared as soon as the correspondence reaches its end.

/rights

Six requests can be made about your own information. Each is answered in writing.

/access

Ask, and whatever sits under your name is copied out and sent over.

/rectify

Flag an entry that reads wrongly and the company corrects it.

/erase

Ask for removal and it follows, apart from records the company remains bound to hold.

/restrict

A record can sit frozen while a query over its accuracy or its use is settled.

/portability

What you supplied under an agreement can be handed back as a machine-readable file.

/object

Challenge one particular use and the company replies with the grounds it relies on.

Where a file stays open because the advice within it might yet be tested, that reason is given to you plainly.

/contact

Write to [email protected], or send a letter to the registered office noted underneath. The records described above rest under the control of SIRM Consulting Ltd, incorporated in England & Wales and holding company number 14122854. Should a reply leave you dissatisfied, the Information Commissioner's Office — the United Kingdom regulator for data protection — will hear the matter.

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