Last updated: 7 October 2026
TaxBot ("we", "us") is a Making Tax Digital (MTD) assistant for self-employed people in the UK, including CIS subcontractors, delivered via Telegram and operated by TaxBot. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, and how we protect it.
TaxBot is a UK-based service. For data protection enquiries contact: privacy@tax-bot.co.uk
We use your data exclusively to: submit quarterly MTD updates to HMRC on your behalf; read the receipts, documents and messages you send so they can be recorded; answer the questions you ask in the chat; generate tax summaries and Excel reports for you; send report and receipt ZIP downloads to your email address; process subscription payments via Stripe; and find and fix errors in the service.
We never sell, share, or use your data for marketing.
We retain your data for as long as your account is active. You may request deletion at any time by contacting privacy@tax-bot.co.uk; we will delete your data within 30 days, except where retention is required by law (financial records must be retained for 6 years under HMRC rules).
We keep encrypted backups of our database (AES-256-GCM). Data you have deleted can remain in a backup until that backup is itself deleted.
Under UK GDPR you have the right to: access your data; correct inaccurate data; request erasure; restrict or object to processing; data portability. Contact privacy@tax-bot.co.uk to exercise any right.
You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).
Sensitive fields (NI number, UTR, HMRC tokens) are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM. All data is transmitted over HTTPS. Access is restricted to the minimum necessary.
If your phone is lost or stolen, tell us straight away. You reach TaxBot through Telegram, so whoever holds your unlocked phone can use it as you — read your records, and file to HMRC in your name. Send LOST to the bot from any other device (Telegram works on several at once) and we will freeze the account: nothing can be read, changed or filed, and your HMRC connection is deleted so nothing can be submitted. Sign the phone out of Telegram as well — Settings, then Devices, then Terminate All Other Sessions — which locks it out entirely. We unfreeze once we know the phone is yours again, and you reconnect HMRC at that point.
If you cannot get into Telegram at all — the phone went with your SIM, so you cannot receive the sign-in code — email support@tax-bot.co.uk from any address. Tell us the name and email on the account and we will freeze it. This is the route that still works when the bot cannot reach you.
A small number of companies help us run TaxBot. By category:
Each company by name, what it receives, the country it processes in and the safeguard that covers it is listed on our subprocessors page. It lives there rather than here so that it stays current: the page is built from the same definition the software itself uses, and our automated checks fail if a company is added without its country and safeguard being recorded.
Section 9 explains which of these process data outside the UK and EU, and what protects it.
Most of your data stays in the UK and the EU. Your account, your figures, your receipt images and the reports we generate are held on servers in the EU, as set out in section 8.
One exception matters, and we would rather be plain about it. When a receipt, a document or a message you type is read, that content is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API, which processes it in the United States. Anthropic does not offer an EU or UK location for this service. Reading what you send is how an entry gets recorded, so this is part of how TaxBot works rather than an optional extra.
That makes it an international transfer of your personal data, so it rests on a contract rather than on trust. Anthropic’s data processing agreement applies to our use of the service automatically, and it incorporates the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum — the template issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office. Anthropic does not use your data to train its models and deletes it within 30 days. The companies Anthropic itself relies on are listed at anthropic.com/subprocessors.
Two other companies process data outside the UK and EU, and they do not rely on the same safeguard as each other. Stripe takes your payments through Stripe Payments UK Ltd and passes payment and billing details to Stripe, Inc. in the United States; Stripe is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and its Data Transfers Addendum also incorporates the UK Addendum. Resend sends our emails: it can dispatch them from Ireland, but your email address, the content of those emails and the delivery logs are held in the United States under the Standard Contractual Clauses.
Telegram is not in that position: for UK and EEA accounts it stores messages in the Netherlands. Your use of Telegram is governed by Telegram’s own privacy policy rather than ours, and Telegram does not publish a data processing agreement.
TaxBot is a messaging-based service and does not use cookies or tracking pixels on its website.
We count visits to the website on our own server instead: which page was viewed, the name of the website that sent you (not the full address), and your country as reported by Cloudflare. To tell how many different people visit on a given day, we also keep a code made from your IP address and browser details, scrambled with a secret key and that day’s date. It changes every day, so visits cannot be linked from one day to the next. Your IP address itself is not stored for website visits, and the daily codes are deleted after 32 days.
Figures you type into our tax calculators are used to work out the result on the page. They are not stored.
We may update this policy from time to time. Significant changes will be notified via the bot. Continued use of TaxBot after notification constitutes acceptance. Where required by law, we will ask you to re-accept the updated policy in the bot.