Client matters

STIP is a research and organization tool. Creating a matter and entering facts here does not create an attorney-client, CPA-client, or consulting relationship with Brown & Associates, and the responses STIP generates are general educational information, not individualized tax or legal advice. For guidance on your specific situation, speak with Brown & Associates or qualified counsel.

Authorized Brown & Associates staff may access the information in this matter to operate, support, and review the service. Such access is logged. Your matter information is not shared with other clients or used to answer other users' questions.

We retain the information in this matter for the duration of your engagement and for 7 years afterward, after which it becomes eligible for deletion. At any time, any member of a matter can export the matter to a downloadable file, and the matter owner can permanently delete the matter.

When you ask a question within this matter, the facts you have marked active in this matter — including an EIN/FEIN if you entered one — are sent to the AI model that drafts the answer, so it can tailor the response to your situation. These facts are used only for this matter's own answers and are treated as background context, not as legal authority. They are never cited as authority, never added to STIP's shared legal-authority sources, and not shared with other clients or used to answer other users' questions. While an answer is being prepared and delivered, your question and the answer text are held in a temporary record, which is deleted within about 30 minutes after the answer is delivered (or within about 90 minutes if the answer is never retrieved). After that, your history keeps only references to which facts were used — not the fact values themselves. We also ask the AI provider not to retain these requests and responses for its own use.

The text of documents you upload to this matter — including text we recover from uploaded images (PNG, JPEG, WebP) using our own in-house text recognition, which never sends your files to another company — may also be sent to the AI model at answer time, so it can tailor this matter's answers to your situation. As with your facts, this document text is treated as background context, not as legal authority, and is never cited as authority. Once the temporary record described above is deleted, your history keeps only references to which documents were used — never their contents and never their filenames. We also ask the AI provider not to retain this document text for its own use.

A matter stores the facts you enter about your situation — notes, assumptions, issues, document references, and a few structured fields such as state, tax type, period, an amount, and your entity's EIN/FEIN. The EIN/FEIN is the only sensitive identifier this tool accepts; please do not enter Social Security or taxpayer ID numbers, bank or account numbers, dates of birth, or assessed liability amounts. Everything you enter here is handled under the separation, retention, and internal-access terms above.