How we use your information
Aberdeen City Council collects and maintains information about your business in order to administer and collect Business Rates (Non-Domestic Rates) within Aberdeen City.
This information can include your name (if you are a sole trader), the name of your business, your business address, financial information including the bank details of your business, contact details for appropriate person(s) within your business and any forwarding address or details of any other business properties you are liable for in Aberdeen City.
We are also provided with information from a variety of different sources, including (but not limited to) the Grampian Assessor, Rating Agents, other local authorities, other services with Aberdeen City Council, property owners, property agents, tenants and Debt Recovery agents. We use this information for administering and collecting business rates.
We share information with the Sheriff Officer, the Grampian Assessor, HMRC, the Scottish Government and other local authorities all as allowed by law.
We are required by law to protect the public funds we administer. We may share information provided to us with other bodies responsible for auditing or administering public funds, to prevent and detect fraud.
How long we keep your information for
We will keep your information whilst you are liable for Business Rates (Non-Domestic Rates) in Aberdeen City. When you are no longer liable for Business Rates in Aberdeen City and have paid your account in full, we will keep your information for the current financial year, plus six more years. We will do this by anonymising our Business Rate records, so your data is removed from them.
We have a project underway to implement anonymisation in our Business Rates system to remove data which has met this retention period. This means we currently still hold information for a longer time. We will update this page once this work has been completed.
Your rights
You have rights to your data, including the right to ask for a copy of it. See more information on all the rights you have, how they work in practice, and the contact details of our Data Protection Officer. You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They are the body responsible for making sure organisations like the Council handle your data lawfully.
Our legal basis
Wherever the Council processes personal data, we need to make sure we have a legal basis for doing so in data protection law. The Council understands ‘collecting and administering business rates’ as part of our public task, as the designated Rating Authority under the terms of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1994 (Section 30).