Audit Scotland
Privacy
This privacy notice tells you what to expect when Audit Scotland collects personal information and explains how we protect your privacy. It applies to information we collect about:
- job applicants and our current and former employees
- our statutory audit work
- complaints, correspondence and other communications such as data subject access requests or freedom of information enquiries
- visitors to our website
- use of cookies by Audit Scotland
This privacy notice was written with brevity and clarity in mind, so it does not provide exhaustive detail of all aspects of our collection and use of personal information. If you have any queries or concerns about our use of your personal information or this notice, please contact us at dataprotection@audit-scotland.gov.uk
Job applicants, current and former Audit Scotland employees
The information you provide as part of the application process will be treated in confidence and will be shared only with members of the selection panel, Human Resources and our third party candidate management specialists for the purposes of the recruitment process. Where we want to disclose information about you to other third parties, for example where we want to take up a reference, we will not do so without informing you beforehand unless the disclosure is required by law.
Personal information about unsuccessful candidates will be held for a maximum period of 18 months after the recruitment campaign has been completed, it will then be destroyed or deleted. This information is used solely for monitoring purposes to form statistical reports on our recruitment activities.
Once a successful candidate has taken up employment with Audit Scotland, they should refer to the Human Resources staff data handling notice in the staff handbook. Once employment with Audit Scotland has ended, we will retain your information in accordance with the requirements of our retention schedule and then delete it.
Our statutory work
When Audit Scotland undertakes audit work under our statutory powers, we may collect information from Scottish public bodies that contain some personal data.
Personal data may be used in audit tests (such as when testing payrolls or housing benefit systems) and to help form judgments and report on financial, Best Value and Value for Money audits and to promote economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public money. We will only use this information for the purpose it was collected. We will hold it securely and when it is no longer needed it will be disposed of in accordance with our retention schedule.
Please note that a separate privacy notice is available for our National Fraud Initiative (NFI) work and is available within the NFI section of our website here.
People who make a complaint or correspond with us
When we receive a complaint, correspondence or concerns about a public body we audit, data subject access or complex freedom of information request, we hold the correspondence in a file.
We will only use the personal information we collect to process the complaint, correspondence or request. However, we may have to disclose your details when investigating it. If you do not want your personal information disclosed we will try to respect this. However, it may not be possible to investigate your request on an anonymous basis. We compile and publish statistics showing information such as the number of complaints and correspondence we receive, but not in a form which identifies anyone.
We will keep information provided to us in complaints, correspondence, data subject access or complex freedom of information requests in line with our retention policy.
Visitors to our website
There may be instances where it is necessary for us to communicate with visitors to our website for administrative or operational reasons. Where we collect specific information from you for this purpose, we will not pass it on to any other organisation.
We also collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns when someone visits our website. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of our site, to monitor the download of our reports and publications and to help improve the service we provide.
This data collection process is carried out electronically in the background and therefore visitors to our website may not be aware that it is taking place. We believe that this process is not intrusive to the visitors’ privacy as we do not make any attempt to find out the identities of visitors to our website. The standard internet log information collected will only be used for the aforementioned purposes and will not be passed on to any other organisation.
Use of cookies by Audit Scotland
We use cookies to collect standard internet information from visitors to our website. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer when you visit most websites. They are widely used to help websites function, work more efficiently and make the visit to the site more enjoyable, as well as providing information to the site's owner. Our recruitment website also uses cookies to allow visitors to securely apply for vacancies.
Audit Scotland’s website uses Google Analytics, which is a web analysis tool to collect the standard visitor log information we need to help us improve your visit experience. Google Analytics uses first-party cookies for this purpose and an overview of Google Analytics and privacy at Google provides more information.
| Cookies | Name | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Google Analytics | _utma _utmt _utmb _utmc _utmz _utmv _ga _gat |
These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our site. We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited. |
| Cookie Compliance Notice | complianceCookie | This cookie is used to hide the cookie compliance banner at the top of the site once you have closed it. |
| Accessible Forms | accessibleForms | Some forms on this website use javascript for layout purposes. This javascript may make the forms difficult to use for users browsing with screen readers. The cookie stores the users preference to use accessible forms without any javascript rendering. |
| System | has_js | This is set by the website’s content management system to check if visitors' browsers have javascript enabled in order to provide certain functionality on the website. |
| Recruitment | .ASPXAUTH .ASP.NET_Sessionid |
Our website links to an external website at apply.audit-scotland.gov.uk, which advertises our current vacancies and allows users to apply for jobs. .ASPXAUTH is used to authenticate users when they log in to this site. .ASP.NET_Sessionid is essential for the site’s software (ASP.NET) to work properly, and to identify individual users on the site. |
| Browsealoud | rwebooks-various | BrowseAloud is a tool that reads text. It uses cookies to enable this functionality and these are necessary for the website to work properly. |
| Youtube | (various) | We embed videos from YouTube. These may set cookies on your computer but YouTube will not store personally identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos. |
| Vimeo | (various) | We embed videos from Vimeo. These may set cookies on your computer but Vimeo will not store personally identifiable cookie information for playbacks of embedded videos. |
To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org. Deleting or blocking our cookies may result in our website not working properly.
You can opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics here.
Audit Scotland’s website search engine
The search engine on our website is designed to be as powerful and easy to use as other popular search engines. It does not collect information from visitors to our website.
Other websites
Our website may contain links to other websites which are outside our control and are not covered by this notice. If you access other sites using the links provided, the operators of these sites may collect information from you which will be used by them in accordance with their privacy notice, which may differ from ours.
Access to personal information
You have a right to access the personal data that we hold about you by making a ‘subject access request’ under the Data Protection Act 1998. You can find more information on our access to personal information pages.
Changes to this privacy notice
We keep our privacy notice under regular review. This privacy policy was last reviewed in January 2017.