• Employers should determine which documents to include in personnel files, and which to keep separate and confidential.

Employee personnel files need to be organized in a manner that allows for quick access. The information also needs to be as complete as possible. These files may be the source of a company’s defense if an employee ever decided to lodge a complaint with a government agency, or file a suit against the employer.

If the information is not accessible, or is not complete, an agency representative may see this as the employer’s noncompliance with a law, or a judge may see this as a lack of evidence of fair employee treatment.

Human resources (HR) professionals retain several documents in a personnel file. In addition, there is some information that organizations may want to think twice about retaining in the same file.

Personnel files should contain information that serves as a legal basis for employment-related decisions such as hiring, promotion, pay, termination, demotion, or training opportunities. This could consist of applications, resumes, performance evaluations, training session rosters or certificates, job descriptions, or documents containing disciplinary information.

HR professionals should organize the files such that some information is not included in the general employee files, but kept separate and confidential.

Keep the following separate:

Equal employment opportunity records — Employment decisions should not be based on protected classes such as sex, race, age, religion, national origin, color, or veteran’s status. Any documents that have information on protected status, whether it’s immigration forms, notes taken during interviewing, or medical leave information, should be kept separate.

Medical information — Employment decisions should not be made based on disability status; in addition, there may include medical privacy issues. Documents that include medical information may be health care benefit claims, the results of pre-employment or safety-related medical tests, or the results of drug tests.

Garnishment information — Employment decisions should not be made based on garnishment orders. Court-ordered garnishment information should be kept separate.

I-9 forms — If the DOL happened to be looking at a company’s employee files, and the I-9s are included in those files, the DOL could review the I-9s along with everything else in the file. With this in mind, an employer may want to keep immigration information separate.