Ask Your Offshore Provider about Their Data Protection Policy

Dec 4, 2008

If you’re here, we can assume you are more concerned than most people about protecting your financial privacy. You probably have already dedicated a significant amount of time and expense to creating an inpenetrable corporation, offshore bank and brokerage account and so on.

But be careful! A structure is only as good as its weakest link. And here at Do Business in Panama, we know from personal experience and from talking to our competitors that the weakest link may not be you the client, but your chosen offshore consultant. Most of them don’t abide by their own data security policies – if they even have one!

The danger is that they will store your confidential data carelessly. In such a way that anyone who cares to hire a half-decent eastern European hacker, or bribe their underpaid secretaries here in Panama, can gain access to confidential information about your offshore company and bank account!

Here at Do Business in Panama, however, that is not how we do business. When we incorporate offshore IBCs or help our clients with their bank account requirements, we commit to go out of our way to protect your information above and beyond what is normal. Well above and beyond it, in fact.

For example, for all communications such as e-mail, telephone (VOIP) and Skype, we use secure trading stations and laptops from Rayservers, which is not just protected against viruses, trojans and hacker attacks, but also against physical seizure or copying through social engineering. Then we use Cryptohippie VPN (as explained in the Q Wealth article on Computer Security for those living an International lifestyle) to secure against eavesdropping either in the office or on the road.

Did you know that many countries now, like the USA and the UK, search laptops at customs when entering? The UK can even legally require you to give up your key. Amazingly, many offshore providers and bankers we know here in Panama carelessly travel back and forth to the USA carrying unencrypted, insecure laptops with highly sensitive data about their clients stored on the hard drives! These people have no clue whatsoever about the huge risk they are creating for all their clients.

As for paper files, we store them in a neutral jurisdiction. That means that if you are for example a UK citizen and you form a Panama Company through our firm, then all records that could possibly link you to that company are stored not in Panama, not in the European Union, but elsewhere offshore (and of course we won’t tell you exactly where, as no-one can legally require you to give up information you don’t know!) If someone managed to break through the veil of corporate and attorney-client secrecy in Panama, the information they get would be close to zero anyway. Sometimes having physical files in different countries is a little inconvenient, but we believe that minor inconvenience or a few extra courier charges are a cost well worth enduring for the sake of protecting our clients’ privacy.

In this blog entry we have mentioned a very few of our data security procedures for our valued offshore consulting clients. There are many more security procedures in place, including many we simply won’t tell anybody, except on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Do Business in Panama offshore services are certainly not the cheapest on the market. Neither do we intend them to be. But what price do you put on your privacy? So if you are considering purchasing offshore services elsewhere, with the information above you can ask your offshore consultant a few probing questions and see how he or she reacts!