Illinois Personnel Record Review Act amendments effective January 1, 2025

The Illinois General Assembly has enacted significant amendments to the Illinois Personnel Record Review Act that took effect on January 1, 2025. The amendments provide guidelines for the record request process and expand both employee rights and employer obligations under the Act.

Important law, confusingly worded

The Illinois Personnel Record Review Act has long provided employees and former employees with the right to review their personnel records. Under the Act, current employees and former employees who have terminated service within the preceding year are entitled, with some exceptions, to inspect personnel documents that are, have been, or are intended to be used in determining their qualifications for employment, promotion, transfer, additional compensation, discharge, or other disciplinary action.

Although the Act is regularly invoked by employees seeking to review their personnel files (often in advance of a lawsuit), the prior version of the Act provided ill-defined guidelines regarding the request process and the scope of available documents. The guidelines sometimes created uncertainty regarding, for example, what exactly needed to be produced. The amendments have clarified the process.

Clarifying amendments

The amendments introduce various changes to the Act but likely the most important ones pertain to the request process and scope of documents available to employees.