Why is data security particularly critical for public accounting firms?

Public accounting firms handle extensive PII and tax data. If a hacker submits a fraudulent tax return before the legitimate one, the IRS accepts it as valid, forcing individuals to fight to recover their tax refund. This makes monitoring who accesses, modifies, and moves data essential for protecting clients.

How does Varonis detect abnormal user behavior?

Varonis operates in a learning mode to establish baseline activity patterns for each user. If someone typically accesses 100 files daily but suddenly touches 10,000 files, the system recognizes this as abnormal behavior outside the baseline and generates alerts that can be tailored to specific criteria.

Securing Tax Data with Varonis at GBQ

Name: Securing Tax Data with Varonis at GBQ
Uploaded: 2026-04-22T18:43:49-04:00
Duration: 1 min 59 s
Description: TL;DR GBQ uses Varonis to protect sensitive tax data and PII from identity theft threats, where fraudulent tax returns can be submitted before legitimate ones. Varonis establishes behavioral baselines for users and alerts on abnormal activity, such as ...

Varonis

04/22/2026

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Transcript

With the IRS, the first tax return that gets submitted is considered to be the tax return. And even if it's a hacker that submits it first, now you're fighting as an individual to get your tax return money. So watching that data and understanding who's got it and who's touching it and where is it going is the most important security function that we have. As a public accounting firm, we have an inordinate amount of PII and confidential data for individuals. And we take their security of their data extremely seriously. We were really worried about who can touch the data, who can see the data, who can modify the data, and who can take the data out of the system and move it into someplace else. You would have to go through a lot of other hoops like Microsoft Purview, but it's honestly just not as good as Varonis. The automated remediations and the alerting has generated an immense amount of peace of mind for me and my team. And now we don't have somebody 24-7 kind of worrying and watching and being concerned. Did somebody get in? Are they supposed to get in? What happened? That's all gone now. The unique part about it was the fact that it does the baseline for you. You put it in learning mode, essentially, and it watches your environment and it takes that data and basically goes, okay, Rob touches 100 files a day, right? And all of a sudden he's touched 10,000 files. That's not normal. That's outside of the baseline, right? That's an abnormal activity that occurs. And it generates alerts from that, and then obviously you can tailor it to what your specific criteria is. With Varonis being able to detect this abnormal behavior is one of the key reasons that we bought it and we use it. Varonis is a key piece of my stack. It covers a large piece of our wording and our monitoring of, is the data going to where it's supposed to go? Are the right people touching it? None of the other tools we have can do that. Even the built-in ones from Microsoft, they're just not as good as what Varonis has. And having that peace of mind and knowing where the data goes and who's touching it, where it's going, is absolutely essential, and Varonis does that for us. Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com.au

TL;DR

GBQ uses Varonis to protect sensitive tax data and PII from identity theft threats, where fraudulent tax returns can be submitted before legitimate ones.
Varonis establishes behavioral baselines for users and alerts on abnormal activity, such as accessing 10,000 files instead of a typical 100 files per day.
The solution provides automated remediation and monitoring capabilities that Microsoft Purview and other built-in tools cannot match, eliminating the need for 24/7 manual security monitoring.

Summary

This customer testimonial features a security leader from GBQ, a public accounting firm, discussing how they use Varonis to protect sensitive tax data and personally identifiable information (PII). The speaker explains the critical threat of identity theft in public accounting, where fraudulent tax returns can be submitted before legitimate ones, making data security paramount. GBQ implemented Varonis to monitor data access, detect abnormal user behavior, and automate security responses. The solution's baseline learning capability allows it to establish normal activity patterns and alert on deviations, such as a user suddenly accessing thousands of files instead of their typical hundred. The speaker emphasizes that Varonis provides capabilities that Microsoft's built-in tools like Purview cannot match, particularly in automated remediation and behavioral analytics. The implementation has eliminated the need for 24/7 manual monitoring and provided peace of mind that sensitive client data is properly protected and tracked throughout its lifecycle.

Chapters

0:00 - Identity Theft Threat in Accounting
0:23 - GBQ's Data Security Challenges
1:01 - Behavioral Baseline Detection
1:31 - Varonis vs Microsoft Tools

Key Quotes

0:06 "With the IRS, the first tax return that gets submitted is considered to be the tax return."
0:40 "You would have to go through a lot of other hoops like Microsoft Purview, but it's honestly just not as good as Varonis."
1:44 "Even the built-in ones from Microsoft, they're just not as good as what Varonis has."

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