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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

The general decline in paper copies of official documents is scary.

The recent Conservative UK government put in place the "hostile environment" policy (official name!) and expelled and denied rights to people who had lived here for years, and had the right to. People were asked for documents going back years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal

If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?

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> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?

"electronic" isn't necessary for this question. Most people do not keep paper copies of their payslips going back 10 or 20 years either.

They're next to my receipt filing-cabinet.

Some form of Paperless-NGX setup is also an option :)

If payslips are paper, people at least have a fighting chance of retaining them. I have payslips from when I was a teenager. Not because I kept them, because I never threw them away.

Electronic documents, however, need deliberate attention to keep.

I purge paper after a year or two at most, and keep very limited important stuff digitally (I have my tax returns going back 5-10 years.)

I really don't think many people keep substantial amounts of paper records. The government policy cited upthread was clearly a scandal; most UK citizens would be unable to satisfy the same standard of proof, if that was in fact the test.

I have more electronic documents saved up from 15 years ago than paper ones. It works both ways though.

Lots of online things are not providing PDFs to download, and are making the web page layout miserable for "print to file" also -- collapsible sections that refuse to be all open, etc.

I know it’s gonna sound stupid, but personally, I’ve literally never had problems. In extreme scenarios, I’ve gone as far as taking screenshots and saving it to my Dropbox and calling it a day. Having your screenshot folder to point to cloud storage then also having autobackups to somewhere else is a better storage than having a gigantic pile of papers.

I don't disagree but I think the companies that still think in discrete report-style paper analogues are easier to archive, and that's slowly going away.

If my employer emailed me my payslip, I'd have a perfect record, as I have every email sent/recieved since the 1990s, with archives and backups too. I could passively collect them, like I passively received paper payslips and stored them, unopened, in a folder on a shelf.

But they don't. At best, they send me an email notifying me that if only I went to a website they run (when it's operational) and passed all sorts of second factor bullshit, and knew where to navigate to, I could download a copy. Apparently it's not secure if they just email it to me, but it was secure enough to send the same data through the hands of hundreds of postal workers.

People only have so much bandwidth, and requiring them to actively do a bunch of menial tasks that could be automated, but aren't, in the name of "security" is building up problems for the future.

You forgot the part where the platform rebranded and got a new domain name. And you have to log in with your company email address. And even if you switched it to your personal email before you left, and they kept the data, was the password rotated?

I'm also leaving out the part where they switched to a different ERP system that cost them millions, and to save some money, didn't import any data from the old system. They put out one email saying download all the old payslips because we're switching off the old system in a week, and if I miss that, my entire history of payslips is GONE FOREVER.

This is why they should send me a copy. It has about the same level of security as when they sent paper copies in the post.

The missing documents case is mentioned in this brilliant podcast, Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford | Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc: https://www.podbean.com/ea/dir-s4nk7-1bcc6872

He mentions a lot of other problems with missing digital docs.

Like high court rulings are referencing URLs that don't exist anymore.

I don't have copies of any payslips. And this isn't because they're digital. If they'd been mailed to me I would have recycled them all by now.

I've kept pay slips in a binder for years and while it was cute to review how much I earned 15 years ago, there was no other reason. I as a civilian do not have any archival requirements once a year's tax records have been finished. The party handling my pay slips - be it an employer or a 3rd party - presumably has a statutory requirement to archive these things for X years.

Back in 2014, we scheduled a vacation that took us to St. Petersburg. As I recall, the Russian visa application wanted the names and addresses of one's three most recent employers. My previous employer was a government contractor that was bought up by another such (General Dynamics?). My second-previous employer was simply out of business for all that I could tell.

I suppose that General Dynamics may still have by pay stubs from back when.

> your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them?

Many (I would hope all, but the world is a weird place) countries have laws stating for how long ago you need to be able to provide various kinds of data to the government.

I would think you wouldn’t need to do that for payslips of 10 or 20 years ago, as companies typically aren’t allowed to keep that data around for that long.

> If your government suddenly asked for your electronic payslips from a job 10 or 20 years ago, could you provide them? Does everyone print them out or store them in secure electronic storage?

I don't know how far it goes back, but in Denmark it should be in the electronic inbox. e-boks / mit.dk

Yeah, most digital services keep these things for you, unless you actively delete it,which few people do. Whereas most people will throw out that stupid old paper.

Frankly, I have better track of my electronic payslips than I ever did of hardcopies.

For some reason, my brain works much better with soft copies.

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