It is a necessary evil that one has to share financial documents with professional advisors while managing either personal or business finances. In the course of a tax season preparation, as well as when dealing with legal matters or seeking financial advice, the accountant or lawyer will need to have access to your bank statements. Those documents, however, happen to be the places where some of the most sensitive pieces of your personal information are kept, thus it is very important to share them in a secure and thoughtful manner.
Bank statements are more than just an account balance show-off. They are the full representation of your spending habits, income sources, vendor relationships, and financial obligations. The routing and account numbers that are visible on these statements can be used by a person who is unauthorized to access your funds if that person happens to be the wrong one. The transaction descriptions can be the source of personal details about your life, health conditions, or business relationships that you might want to keep confidential. Knowing the ways to safeguard this data while giving your professionals the necessary documents is a must if one wants to keep both compliance and privacy.
Removing Sensitive Information Before Sharing
Once you have figured out what information is necessary, you may start preparing your statements to be shared. The objective is to keep the financial data accurate and useful while at the same time, removing or disguising the pieces of information which are not your professional relationship. This operation calls for a level of expertise which is far beyond simply taking a marker and blacking out text on a hard copy of a page.
These days bank statements are usually digital (PDFs) and this fact is both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of privacy protection. Digitally, one can do an impeccable, professional redaction in a way that the removed information is actually deleted and not just covered. Nonetheless, if the wrong methods are used, your confidential information may be left in a way that it can be accessed by anyone with basic technical knowledge.
First of all, write down all the information that is going to be protected. Normally, this would be the case for your complete account number (only the last four digits being left visible), routing numbers, account numbers of other financial institutions (if these are in your transfer descriptions), and personal transaction details that are not of interest to the professional you are dealing with. Perhaps you want to redact the information of certain vendors or service providers, which disclose your personal, sensitive matters.
The technical aspect of bank statement modification requires proper tools that permanently remove data from the PDF file itself. Simply placing black boxes over text in a basic PDF viewer doesn’t actually delete the information it just covers it visually. The original text remains embedded in the file and can be easily revealed. Professional redaction tools eliminate the data entirely, replacing it with solid blocks that contain no recoverable information.
Establishing Ongoing Security Practices
Bank statements sharing should not be just a single-time consideration but rather part of a relationship with the security side being always clear. Once you initiate a relationship with a new accountant or lawyer, get to know their document security practices immediately. Find out how they keep the client financial information, if they use encryption, how long they store the documents, and what happens to your files when the professional relation will be over.
Good professionals will be able to provide you with the exact answers to these questions and, in addition, they would be happy to give you a detailed explanation of their security protocols. They are aware that your financial information is a huge trust and therefore they should have the appropriate systems in place to ensure its safety. A professional who shows indifference to security issues or cannot provide you with measures of protection is definitely warning you not to trust him/her.
Balancing Transparency with Privacy
The interplay between privacy protection and professional transparency is a matter that needs careful consideration. It is necessary for your accountant or lawyer to have enough information to give you competent advice and services, however, it doesn’t mean that you have to give away all the details of your financial life without any consideration. The main thing is to realize that keeping your privacy does not imply that you have to hide the relevant information, it means that you should have the control over how your information is shared and be sure that it is given the proper protection.
If it is done in the right way, the act of preparing bank statements for sharing actually deepens the quality of your professional relationships. It obliges you to analyze your finances critically, it facilitates the identification of the transactions that are most important for your particular needs, and it convinces your professionals that you are a person who takes information security seriously. Usually, this level of care is characteristic of clients who are organized, thoughtful, and actively participating in their financial and legal matters.
