Security & data handling

In one line

VouchDoc replaces unencrypted email attachments as the way tax documents reach your desk. Clients upload through an encrypted portal with no account to create; documents are stored encrypted in US data centers, reachable only by your firm, deleted on a schedule you set, and every access is logged.

Encryption & access control

In transit

Every upload and every page load travels over TLS. Clients upload directly to encrypted storage — documents are never sent as email attachments.

At rest

All stored documents and database records are encrypted at rest (AES-256).

Social Security numbers

Encrypted individually at the field level (AES-256-GCM) on top of the encryption above. Displayed as XXX-XX-1234; revealing one is decrypted server-side and written to the audit trail with the user and timestamp. SSNs never appear in logs, error reports, analytics or email.

Who can sign in

Two-factor authentication is mandatory for every firm user — a one-time code by email, or an authenticator app. Each firm's data is isolated at the database level, so one firm can never read another's.

How clients get in

Each client receives one cryptographically signed link that expires after 30 days and can be revoked at any time. Clients create no account and hold no password — there are no client credentials to be phished or reused.

What is recorded

Logins, uploads, downloads, edits, SSN reveals, exports, link revocations and deletions are written to an append-only audit trail scoped to your firm.

Where your clients' data is processed

No taxpayer document, and no data extracted from one, leaves the United States. Storage, hosting and email all run in US regions; the one extraction resource still pending its move is noted below, and it has never received a client document. Each subprocessor below operates under a signed data processing agreement; this is the complete list.

Automated data extraction

VouchDoc reads the figures off W-2s and 1099s using Microsoft Azure's prebuilt tax models — a fixed, pre-trained service, not a general-purpose chatbot.

• · Microsoft does not use data sent to its prebuilt models to train them. Your clients' documents never become training data — for Microsoft or for us.
• · No human reviews your documents at any point in the process.
• · Azure deletes the analysis results within 24 hours.
• · Documents are transmitted as bytes over an authenticated connection. No third-party service ever receives a link to your storage.
• · Extracted figures are yours: nothing is sold, shared, pooled across firms, or used for any purpose other than producing your export.

Retention & deletion

These are the limits we hold ourselves to, and the shortest ones we can operate on. You set the retention window for documents; the rest are fixed. Deletions are recorded in the audit trail, and you can request an earlier purge at any time.

If something goes wrong

Our incident procedure is written down: contain (rotate keys, revoke client links, disable the portal if needed), scope the exposure through the audit trail, then notify every affected firm within 72 hours with the facts and the actions taken — along with a ready-to-send notice for your own clients, following IRS Pub. 4557. Every incident ends in a written postmortem. Security contact: security@vouchdoc.com.

For your WISP

Every PTIN holder attests to having a Written Information Security Plan. Client document collection is one of its hardest sections to write honestly. If VouchDoc is how your documents come in, this paragraph can be pasted as is:

Client document collection (VouchDoc). Client tax documents are collected exclusively through VouchDoc, an encrypted client portal. Clients upload documents over TLS; files are encrypted at rest, Social Security Numbers are additionally encrypted at the field level, and access requires multi-factor authentication. No taxpayer documents or SSNs are exchanged over unencrypted email. Access is logged and data is retained only as long as needed and then securely purged.

What we do not claim

• VouchDoc is not SOC 2 certified. The infrastructure we run on is (Supabase, Microsoft Azure); our own SOC 2 Type I audit is on the roadmap, not completed. We would rather tell you than let a vendor logo imply otherwise.
• Retention is enforced by hand during beta. The windows in the table above are the policy we operate to, and deletion on request is immediate — but the scheduled job that applies them automatically is not built yet, and backup restores have not been rehearsed on a quarterly cycle. Both land before we hold production data for paying firms.
• Our extraction resource is not yet in a US region. During beta, document extraction points at a development Azure resource hosted in Europe, and it processes synthetic test files only — no client document has ever reached it. The US East production resource is provisioned before any real taxpayer document is extracted. We are telling you now rather than after.
• Cyber liability insurance will be in place before we open to paying firms. If you are reading this during our beta, ask us for the current status and we will answer plainly.
• This is not legal or tax advice. Your obligations under IRC §7216, the FTC Safeguards Rule and your own WISP remain yours. VouchDoc is document-collection infrastructure — like your tax software, your scanner or your cloud storage — and does not prepare returns. Confirm your specific situation with your advisor or E&O carrier.