Keeping Employee Information and Personal Files

Keeping Employee Information and Personal Files

We are sometimes asked questions about how long employee information and personal files should be held for. This is a simple question but the answer is not so simple. This is because there are different legislative requirements depending on the specific information you are holding.

Under the Employment Relations Act, the Minimum Wage Act and the Holidays Act, you are required to keep time, wage, leave and other employment records for a minimum of six years.

IRD requirements dictate that you keep all financial/ account records, including all wage, PAYE and KiwiSaver records, for at least seven years.

Under the Privacy Act, you must not keep personal information (being any information about an identifiable individual) for longer than is required for the purposes for which it may be lawfully used.

If you are undertaking any health and safety health monitoring under the Health and Safety at Work (General Risk and Workplace Management) Regulations 2016, the requirements are:

• For monitoring undertaken to detect asbestos-related disease, you must retain the records for 40 years;

• For all other health monitoring, you must retain the records for 30 years.

Health monitoring is any monitoring of a person to identify changes in his or health status because of exposure to certain hazards arising from the conduct of your business. Worksafe has issued a fact sheet about health monitoring. This is available on Worksafe’s website (worksafe.govt.nz).

In summary, apart from any health monitoring records, we recommend you retain personal files and associated records to meet the IRD requirement (i.e. at least seven years) unless there is some ongoing privacy related need to retain them for longer.

Danny Jacobson and Trudy Marshall are Partners at Employment Lawyers Tauranga and they specialise exclusively in employment law. They operate our Employment Helpline for NZCB members: Phone 07 928 0529. They have also previously produced a Guide for Employers in the Construction Industry which NZCB can send out to any members on request. (The above is by its nature general, and is not intended to be a substitute for legal advice.)