Are most online brokerage statement and W2 pdfs encrypted?

Key tips and advice the working tax pro can use.
#1
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Quality of pdfs created by clients has not been so good the last few years as they switched to using their phones for scanning.

Screws up the OCR populating by Gruntworx or SurePrep etc.

My preference is for them to send me original pdfs that they downloaded from their brokerage and employer portals. For the other docs I'm asking for paper originals unless they have desktop scanners.

Question: am I just creating a password hassle by asking for originals? If client has to log into brokerage firm portal, are most of them providing unencrypted pdfs or encrypted?

I could unencrypt given the pw, but for smaller clients might just say send me original paper statements etc.
 

#2
makbo  
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I don't recall ever running into a password protected PDF from a major brokerage that required the password just to open it. However a few of them are locked against editing and printing to PDF, which is annoying since I can't add my tick marks into the document.
 

#3
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Makbo, that's even worse then pw protected to open. Have you tried opening and printing in an Adobe clone? There's https://www.passware.com which I used to use on QB desktop files to remove pw protection, until I found it prevented me from updating data files to newer versions of QB. Then you sb able to change all the properties.

PDFShell tools might also remove those restrictions.

You'd use the existing pw to remove the restrictions.
 

#4
AlexCPA  
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Makbo,

I also encountered issues in applying tickmarks to protected PDFs which did not allow for editing. After some Google-ing, I learned that the Chrome web browser does not respect these limitations. Accordingly, if you email the files to yourself, open them in Chrome, and print them to PDF, you will be able to edit the resulting PDF files.

If your PDFs are opening in a separate PDF program and not in the browser itself, you will want to adjust the following setting:

Settings > (scroll all the way down) Advanced > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > PDF documents > "Download PDF files instead of automatically opening them in Chrome" and set that to "OFF".

Hope this helps! :)
Even more of my antics may be found on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXDitB ... sMwfO19h7A
 


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