How many laws? Good question -- that depends on how you slice and dice
it. Laws of general applicability -- tax laws, labor laws and the like,
some thousands -- maybe eight or 10 thousand. That sort of depends on
how you slice and dice it too, because a single statutory section may
contain several or many separate requirements. Is that one law or many laws?
In addition, there are industry -- specific requirements for a great
many industries, from securities to food service. There are many many
thousands of additional laws in this category as well.
All of the above is compounded by the fact that each of the 50 states
and several territories and several Indian nations is really an
independent nation, and will commonly replicate most or all of the
federal bureaucracy on the state level, with the resulting
multiplication of every requirement by 50. So it's a lot. I'm not sure
that anybody has a good count for the entire mass, but it is certainly
well north of 15,000, maybe north of 20,000, maybe a lot more.
Which one controls, state or federal? Depends. There is a legal doctrine
called preemption that is used to determine this. Sometimes the feds
have jurisdiction and wish to exert sole jurisdiction, and so they
preempt any state law that does not conform to the federal requirement.
In other cases the feds and the states have concurrent jurisdiction and
federal law serves as a minimum which can be and sometimes is exceeded
by state requirements. In still other cases, the matter is uniquely
state in nature, and state requirements control. Which of these is the
case depends on the subject matter in question, and whether or not the
feds intended their law to preempt state law.
State laws are not necessarily uniform across the states, or even within
a state. State legislatures and agencies do tend to crib language from
pre-existing legislation, so in some cases you'll see uniformity of the
language used; and there has been a movement afoot for many years to
pass uniform state laws so that there would be conformity. The Uniform
Commercial Code is a good example of this. However, once having got hold
of some uniform language, legislators and regulators in each state like
to tinker with it, and commonly tinker with the retention periods, so
that for a given topic, there's liable to be a pretty substantial
variation in the retention periods between the states. Even within a
single state, where several agencies may regulate a particular kind of
record, such as payroll records, which are regulated by the wage and
hour division, the unemployment compensation folks and maybe a couple of
others, you may get different retention periods as between these two
agencies. So there's no guarantee that a retention period you find in a
law someplace is necessarily the controlling retention period if there
are other laws on the topic. They may well be different.
Glen Sanderson wrote:
> We all have should have a schedule that allows us to determine the retention of company records. A retention schedule that has its basis in regulatory and statutory requirements. We know that requirements change and I have heard a few different numbers of laws that affect retention several years ago and I am sure it has increased since. Does anyone know how many laws there are in the US that affect retention? Are they fairly uniform across states? Does federal always trump state or does state trump federal?
>
>
--
Best regards,
John
John Montaņa
Montaņa & Associates
29 Parsons Road
Landenberg Pennsylvania 19350
610-255-1588
484-653-8422 mobile
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