Employee data retention policy - How long the company should keep data of an employee after separation?

How long the company should keep data of an employee after separation. Such as Resume past employment history, tax documents, and others.

The establishment ought to have a clearly laid down Record Retention Policy. The records have to be categorised into permanent and temporary records. The permanent records, as the name implies have to be stored for ever, like the offer of appointment its acknowledgement, the appointment order, termination order, last drawn salary details, terminal benefits paid, career progression etc., and all others are temporary, they may be kept for a max. period to be specified. 3 years is suggested.
The records which have expired can be destroyed after preparing a list of the files. Such an elaborate record keeping would help in dealing with such matters authoritatively. This would be particularly helpful to those in government sector, who have to bear the RTI queries.

Dear Ashima,

You could have searched this forum. There was a similar query in 2013, and I had given a reply to the query. You may click the following link to refer to it:

https://www.citehr.com/457085-employ...ml#post2045789

Anyway, 2021 is different from 2013. Now the modern HRIS has a provision to retain the documents of the ex-employees. If your HRIS does not have, then you may scan the copies on your own and retain the offline records on your computer. Please make sure that these records become part of the handing/taking over process. The guidelines for preserving the hard copies are mentioned in my above reply. As far as retention of the soft copies is concerned, these can be preserved for 'n' number of years.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar