When you employ employees, you must keep a personal file for them. An employee’s personnel file consists of 3 parts and includes:
- part A – documents collected in connection with the application for employment,
- in Part B, documents relating to the establishment of the employment relationship and the employee’s employment history,
- in Part C, documents relating to termination of employment
The regulations require that disciplinary sanctions be kept in Part B of the personnel file. And this is where the problem arises. The documents in the different parts of the personnel file should be arranged in chronological order and numbered, each part containing a complete list of the documents in it. In the meantime, the punishment is considered to be null and void and a copy of the punishment notice is removed from the employee’s personal file after one year of impeccable service. The employer may, on its own initiative or at the request of the company trade union organisation representing the employee, declare the penalty null and void before the expiry of this period. This rule shall apply mutatis mutandis in the event that the employer upholds the objection or the labour court issues a decision to annul the penalty.
Therefore, since an erased penalty is considered to be no longer valid, there should be no trace of it in the file. However, the removal of the document will result in a “hole” in the file. It is true that the documents can be renumbered, but this is additional, tedious work. In order to avoid this, it is possible to designate a subdivision in Part B for the penalty orders themselves. In this case, deleting the penalty will not necessitate renumbering all the documents.