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Am I Required To Keep Records of My Employees Rate of Pay and Hours Worked?

On Behalf of | Dec 22, 2014 | Uncategorized

A lot of employers are unaware of the requirements in New York State and  that you  keep records of the hours that your employees work and off their pay rates. Oftentimes,  companies in White Plain, New York will hire outside payroll companies to handle these matters and certainly that’s advisable and certainly they can keep track of the hours the employees worked, as well as the rates of pay, any raises, any overtimes that paid, and vacations etc. but sometimes employers don’t want to go that expense and they keep that information to themselves. Oftentimes, employees are required to punch clocks or there might be a sign in and a sign out sheet or maybe there might be at the end of the week a simple sign off payroll record but one thing that a lot of employers don’t do, is that they don’t keep track, they trust their employees, especially in small companies and small employment situations, they trust that the employees are getting the job done within whatever number of hours that takes them to get it done. They trust that the employee is taking the appropriate lunch break and they are not extending their time over 40 hours a week or it might trigger a time issue. However, you can’t just always trust the circumstances because when you do that, you find yourself dealing with a subject of a lawsuit. For example, from an employee who could have left the company many years earlier and now feels that they are entitled to receive additional pay for all the work that they put in. It’s really critical as an employer that you keep track of your employees rates of pay, whatever overtimes that they are entitled to and you are paying them, their lunch breaks and all of those things really need to be accurately recorded, this way if you find yourself at the end of a lawsuit, your attorney can at least have the documentation to support your defense and any argument that you can make to try to in a way distinguish the claim whether it’s one year old, two or three years old, these things can take on a life of their own and you don’t want to be subjected to that down the road.

This informational blog post was provided by Kim Berg, an experienced White Plains, New York Employment Attorney.