Exempt Employee Records

Even though you may have employees who are exempt under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), you are not exempt from keeping records on them under the FLSA. Records are required to determine whether you have met the necessary conditions in classifying an employee as exempt.

If your employees qualify as exempt because they are classified as executive, administrative, and professional employees, you must keep the following information on them:

• name
• home address
• date of birth, if under 19 (to comply with child labor provisions)
• gender (to comply with equal pay provisions)
• occupation
• time of day and day of week on which the employee's workweek begins
• total wages paid each pay period
• date of payment and the pay period covered by each payment

Because these employees are not paid by the hour, you do not — and should not — keep track of the number of hours they put in. Doing so could make it seem to a wage-hour auditor that you are indeed basing pay on the number of hours worked, which would mean that the employee was not exempt and that you might end up being liable for overtime for that employee.