Client returns that never touch a stranger’s server
A tax file is the most complete financial portrait of a person that exists outside a bank. The IRS is blunt about what that means for the people who hold it, and about the fact that preparers are now a target in their own right. These tools do the everyday document work without the file leaving your machine.
IRS Publication 4557 and the FTC Safeguards Rule
Publication 4557 states it plainly — protecting taxpayer data is the law. Federal law gives the FTC authority to set data safeguard regulations for professional tax return preparers, and under the Safeguards Rule preparers must create and enact a written security plan to protect client data; failure to do so may result in an FTC investigation. The same guide tells you to encrypt sensitive files, limit access to taxpayer data to those who need to know, and treat data theft at preparers’ offices as a rising risk rather than a hypothetical. A document that is never transmitted is the simplest way to satisfy a plan you have to be able to show someone.
The everyday jobs
Where we can’t help
- We do not prepare, calculate or file returns. These are document tools that sit beside your tax software, not a replacement for it.
- Statement conversion checks its own totals against the closing balance and tells you when they disagree. It does not remove the need to read the result.
- A written information security plan is still yours to write — see IRS Publication 5708. Using on-device tools is one control within it, not the plan.
- We keep no record of what you converted, which means we also cannot reconstruct it for an audit trail.
Your toolkit
The 12 tools this work actually reaches for, out of 80.
Convert one statement with the Network tab open. The absence of a request is the whole argument.
Convert a statementAlso written for