Electronic employee documentation in 2019

New regulations on employee e-documentation came into force on January 1^st, 2019, but since they were not obligatory, many companies still have the digitization of documentation ahead of them. We present to you a brief guide on this topic.

At the beginning of the current year, employers faced the choice of whether to undertake the effort of digitizing employee documentation or stay with the traditional form of archiving. Regardless of the choice made, employee e-documentation (just like its paper equivalent) must be divided into 4 parts:

• A – documents from before the employment period: CVs, employment and medical certificates.
• B – documents made during the employment period: employment contract, duties list, periodic medical certificate, documents related to holidays, training, examinations.
• C – documents related to the termination of employment: termination agreement, testimonials.
• D – documents related to the employee taking in-work responsibility (like reprimands).

E-documents, Social Security Office and reduced storage time

The amendment to the said regulations introduced a new time dimension for the mandatory archiving of documents. The reduction from 50 to 10 years will automatically include the files of all employees employed after January 1^st, 2019.

Employees employed during 1999-2018

The reduction from 50 to 10 years requires the submission of appropriate forms to the Social Security Office. The “ZUS ODW” statement is necessary and serves as a declaration of will to provide crucial “ZUS RIA” information reports.

The deadlines for submitting “ZUS RIA” reports are directly related to the date of termination of employment of a given employee or contractor (with deregistration from social security), which is why it is not possible to indicate one final date, which applies to all employers.

Also, according the regulation, the employer is obliged to provide the employee with a report in a paper version and to give out employment-related documents only after the submission of the proper application by the employee, not earlier than 10 years after submitting the report.