Kevin Jackson Discusses Importance of Personnel Record Maintenance in Wage-and-Hour Class Actions

Foley & Lardner Senior Counsel Kevin Jackson is quoted in the HR Dive article, “Ex-P.F. Chang’s employees allege wage-and-hour violations, recordkeeping failures,” discussing the importance of maintaining employee personnel records.

Jackson said the list of records critical when facing wage-and-hour class action claims includes clock-in and clock-out times, wage statements, and payroll, among others.

“In wage-and-hour class actions, the time records for the putative class members are one of the primary pieces of discovery that plaintiffs’ counsel will request,” he explained said. “As the employer, you also need them because you want to do your own analysis on the records to confirm whether your practices are lining up with your policies.”

Jackson noted that record maintenance has become difficult for organizations as many timekeeping and payroll functions are outsourced to vendors, which means employers don’t always keep a copy of these records on their own servers.

“This is an issue we’re running into a lot more than we used to five to 10 years ago,” Jackson said. He added that employers may want to take a second look at their vendor contracts to ensure that they are to be receive regular backups for up to four years of data, as well as a full copy of all their data before they terminate services with a vendor.