Privacy Statement

The accounting firm of I.L. "Lonnie" Morris, CPA & Company takes your privacy very seriously. As your accountants, the State of Texas mandates that we hold everything you give us as confidential. In certain cases, the State of Texas even considers some of the information you give us as privilege (meaning we would not be required to divulge the information even if we were called into court). As a paid tax preparer, the Internal Revenue Service even has sanctions against the preparer should he make any unauthorized disclosures. (A return preparer who uses return information for any purpose other than to prepare a return, or who makes an unauthorized disclosure of return information, is subject to a $250 penalty for each disclosure, up to a maximum of $10,000. If the action is undertaken knowingly or recklessly, the preparer may be subject to criminal penalties or a fine of up to $1,000 or up to a year in jail, or both, together with the cost of prosecution.) A taxpayer may bring a civil action for damages against the US government if an IRS employee offers the taxpayer's representative favorable tax treatment in exchange for information about the taxpayer.

Knowing that the above sanctions could be taken against us, you can rest easy knowing that we do not share your information with anyone outside of our office. Within our office, we gather your information for the sole purpose of preparing an income tax return. Since the preparation of your return is a team effort, we do share all of your information with all employees within our office. But once we leave the confines of our office, we leave all such information at the office. We do not, and we will not discuss your information amongst ourselves (lest someone might accidentally overhear us), nor with anyone else, unless we have been given your verbal or written permission. We take very seriously the obligation to keep that information confidential and private.

We electronically file your returns with the IRS. In order to perform our job, we use an outside source to provide our electronic filing technology. The name of the company is Lacerte, an Intuit company. We have received from them, and have on file their privacy statement. In their letter they state "As an approved Transmitter of electronically filed federal income tax returns, Intuit follows stringent guidelines to ensure taxpayer data remains secure and private. We believe that the IRS consistently takes effective and appropriate action to regulate and monitor e-file program participants. Consumer privacy and the protection of taxpayer data have been . and continue to be . of critical concern to Intuit. We will continue to work with the IRS to ensure that taxpayer data and personally identifiable information are handled appropriately".

Our firm is a member of the Smith Barney Professional Alliance Program. As such we assist in soliciting clients for them and are paid a commission by them for such referrals. We also work with other investment firms on a non-commission basis. We do this to help our clients merge their investment strategies with their income tax strategies. As such, our firm comes under regulations by the Texas State Securities Board as an "Investment Advisor". However, until a client specifically puts it in writing, no information of any kind (including names, addresses, phone numbers, and financial information) are shared with Smith Barney or any other investment firm. Upon such written authorization, we will share only that information which we deem necessary under the circumstances.

We also work with MLPS to assist our clients in refinancing their home mortgages. As with Smith Barney, we do not share any information with MLPS until a client specifically requests that we do, and even then we only share that information which we deem necessary under the circumstances.

We thank you for allowing us to be your CPA.
I.L. "Lonnie" Morris, CPA & Company