Version 2026-06-01. This document is a plain-language contract, not legal advice — have counsel review it against your state's requirements before you rely on it in a dispute.
Payroll records are evidence. The IRS expects employment tax records to be kept at least four years, the FLSA three, and several states demand more — so Checkmate standardizes on a single, defensible seven-year retention period measured from the pay date, period end, or event date of each record. Within that window, records are preserved and cannot be deleted by an ordinary user action.
| Record | Retained | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Pay stubs and payroll runs | 7 years from pay date | IRS §6001 · FLSA 29 CFR 516 · state wage rules |
| Tax filings, W-2s and 1099s | 7 years from filing | IRS §6501 assessment window plus margin |
| Time entries and timesheets | 7 years from period end | FLSA 3-year floor, extended to match payroll |
| Funding events and payout ledger | 7 years from event | Financial audit trail |
| Audit log entries | 7 years from event | Security and compliance forensics |
| Employee identity records (SSN, address) | 7 years after separation | Tax and wage-claim exposure |
| Bank and card tokens | Deleted on unlink or separation | No reason to keep a payout token after the rail closes |
| GPS clock-in coordinates | 24 months | Geofence disputes only — not a long-term record |
| Remote-tracking IP and geolocation | 12 months | Shortest window that still supports a dispute |
| Support and Buddy chat transcripts | 24 months | Service quality |
A scheduled background task sweeps every tenant nightly and flags each record whose retention window has closed, stamping it with the date it became purge-eligible and the retention basis that expired. The sweep is idempotent and, by deliberate design, non-destructive: a machine never deletes payroll history.
A deletion request under GDPR Art. 17 or CCPA §1798.105 is honoured immediately for everything not subject to a statutory hold: your login, profile, contact details, uploaded documents, GPS history and payment tokens. Payroll history your employer is legally required to keep is anonymized rather than destroyed — the financial record survives for the tax authority, stripped of the identifiers that point to you.
Encrypted backups follow a rolling 35-day window; a record deleted from the live database ages out of backups within that period. Processors keep their own records under their own schedules: Stripe and Plaid retain transaction data for the period their financial regulators require, independent of this policy.
Retention, litigation-hold and purge requests: privacy@checkmatepayrolls.com.
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