On 1 January 2019, the regulation of the Minister of Labour, Family and Social Policy on the rules of keeping employee documentation comes into force. The new provisions will introduce a number of changes to the rules of collecting and keeping documentation related to the employment relationship. In particular, they will specify in detail the requirements that employers should meet if they want to change the form of keeping employee documentation from paper to electronic.

One of the key changes is the introduction of new rules for keeping employees’ personnel files, which should now have four – not three – parts. The new, fourth part should contain documents related to the employee’s liability, including, for example, copies of notifications about disciplinary penalties imposed on the employee.

The new regulations will apply to the employee documentation of individuals hired on or after 1 January 2019 and to the documentation of other employees collected on or after this date. Employee documentation collected before 1 January 2019 may continue to be stored according to the old rules – however, in practice, employers may not wish to do so because of the complications of applying two different legal acts to the personnel files of the same employee.