Corporate clients

Collection of personal data

Our policy is to collect only the personal data necessary for agreed purposes and we ask our clients to only share personal data with us where it is strictly needed for those purposes. 

Where we need to process personal data to provide professional services, we ask our clients to provide the necessary information to the data subjects regarding its use. Our clients may use relevant sections of this Privacy Statement or refer data subjects to this Privacy Statement if they consider it appropriate to do so.

The categories of personal data processed by us in relation to the services we provide are generally:

• Personal details (e.g. name, age/date of birth, gender, marital status, country of residence);
• Contact details (e.g. email address, contact number, postal address);
• Financial details (e.g. salary and other income and investments, benefis, tax status);
• Job details (e.g. role, grade, experience and performance information); and
• Personal data concerning criminal convictions and offences (hereinafter “criminal personal data”): (e.g. data from open sources - including sanction lists, newspaper articles or other media that are publicly accessible - that link a person to convictions or involvement in facts that would lead to a conviction. This can be a criminal proceeding, but also a civil or administrative proceeding.)

For certain services or activities, we may process special categories of personal data (such as in performing ‘know your client’ checks and providing immigration and tax services, which involve us processing government identification documents that may contain biometric data or data revealing racial or ethnic origin or as part of an audit of an organisation in the health sector).

In general we only collect personal data from our clients or from third parties when providing services to the relevant client.

Use of personal data

We use personal data for the following purposes:

• Providing professional services

We provide a diverse range of professional services (click here for information on our services). Some of our services require us to process personal data in order to provide advice and deliverables. For example, we will review payroll data as part of an audit and we often need to use personal data to provide global mobility, tax and pensions services. In some cases, we also process criminal personal data, for example in the case of a person-oriented or background investigation (including an investigation into fraud or the circumstances of a certain event, or the functioning, action or omission of action by a (legal) person).

Legal grounds: Legitimate interests, legal obligation, public interest or consent

This processing of personal data by us is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us in providing professional services and our client in receiving professional services as part of running their organisation and, in some cases, we have a legal obligation to provide the services in a certain way (e.g. statutory audit).  Where we process special categories of personal data, we rely on a relevant public interest condition or consent. When we process criminal personal data, we rely on the legitimate interest of PwC NL and/or our clients.

• Administering, managing and developing our businesses and services

We may process personal data in order to run our business, including:

• managing our relationship with clients and prospective clients;

• developing our businesses and services (such as identifying client needs and improvements in service delivery);

• maintaining and using IT systems;

• hosting or facilitating the hosting of events; and

• administering and managing our website and systems and applications.

Legal grounds: Legitimate interests

This processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us to administer, manage and develop our business and services.

• Security, quality and risk management activities

We have security measures in place to protect our and our clients’ information (including personal data), which involve detecting, investigating and resolving security threats.  Personal data may be processed as part of the security monitoring that we undertake; for example, automated scans to identify harmful emails. We monitor the services provided to clients for quality purposes, which may involve processing personal data stored on the relevant client file.  We have policies and procedures in place to monitor the quality of our services and manage risks in relation to client engagements. We collect and hold personal data as part of our client engagement and acceptance procedures. As part of those procedures we carry out searches using publicly available sources (such as internet searches and sanctions lists) to identify politically exposed persons and heightened risk individuals and organisations and check that there are no issues that would prevent us from working with a particular client (such as sanctions, criminal convictions (including in respect of company directors), conduct or other reputational issues).  

Legal grounds: Legitimate interests

This processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us to ensure network and information security, manage risks to our business and check the quality of our services.

• Providing our clients and prospective clients with information about us and our range of services

Unless we are asked not to, we use client and prospective client  business contact details to provide information that we think will be of interest about us and our services.  For example, industry updates and insights, other services that may be relevant and invites to events.

Legal grounds: Legitimate interests

This processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us to promote our business and services.

• Complying with any requirement of law, regulation or a professional body of which we are a member

As with any provider of professional services, we are subject to legal, regulatory and professional obligations.  We need to keep certain records to demonstrate that our services are provided in compliance with those obligations and those records may contain personal data.

Legal grounds: Legal obligation or legitimate interests

This processing is necessary for us to comply with a legal obligation; for example, when conducting customer due diligence checks to comply with anti-money laundering regulations and, where we do not have a legal obligation, we have a legitimate interest in processing personal data as necessary to meet our regulatory or professional obligations.

Monitoring / Analyzing / Benchmarking / Analyzing our services

We are constantly looking for ways to help our customers and improve our activities and services. To the extent that we have agreed with our customers, we may also use information that we receive in the course of providing professional services for other legitimate purposes, such as conducting analyzes to gain more insight into certain issues, industries or sectors, the feedback of those insights to our customers, the improvement of our activities, services and range of services and the development of new PwC NL technologies and services. To the extent that the information we receive in the course of providing professional services contains personal information, we will anonymize that information before using the information for these purposes.

Legal grounds: legitimate interest

We have a legitimate interest in anonymizing data to help our customers, to improve our business, services and services, and to develop new PwC NL technologies and services, including by performing benchmarks and analyzes.

Data retention

We retain the personal data processed by us for as long as is considered necessary for the purpose for which it was collected (including as required by applicable law or regulation). Personal data will be retained about our contacts at our suppliers for as long as it is necessary for the purposes set out above (e.g. for as long as we have, or need to keep a record of, a relationship with a contact, which is for the duration of our relationship with a contact or their organisation) and then deleted in line with our deletion and retention policies.

Personal data may be held for longer periods where extended retention periods are required by law or regulation and in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights.

When and how we share personal data and locations of processing

Further details about the processors (such as IT service providers) used by PwC NL and locations of processing are provided here. We may use other organisations to help us deliver our services as agreed with our client on an engagement-specific basis.