What a DOL Wage and Hour Audit Asks For, and How to Have Your Time Records Ready

01

What the investigator asks for

The Fair Labor Standards Act sets out what records to keep and leaves the timekeeping method to you. The DOL's Fact Sheet 21 (read September 8, 2026) lists the records every covered employer must keep for each nonexempt worker. It says plainly that "Employers may use any timekeeping method they choose... Any timekeeping plan is acceptable as long as it is complete and accurate."

That sentence sets the standard. Paper cards, a spreadsheet, or a phone app all meet it when the record is complete and accurate. An investigator's request is for the records the law requires, so the practical question is whether you can hand over each item on the list for every worker, for the period requested, without reconstructing anything.

We wrote about the retention side in How Long Do You Have to Keep Timesheets and Payroll Records?. This post is about the list itself and the places a field crew's records come up short.

02

The records checklist for a field crew

Here is Fact Sheet 21's list, read as a crew owner. The fact sheet also lists basic identifying information for each employee, which your payroll system already holds.

The first two rows can only come from your time records, and everything else is computed from them. If the daily hours are wrong, the weekly total, the overtime, and the total wages are wrong too. The unit is the workweek, so a biweekly payroll still needs the hours totaled per week.

03

The two-year and three-year clocks

Fact Sheet 21 sets two retention periods. "Each employer shall preserve for at least three years payroll records," and "Records on which wage computations are based should be retained for two years, i.e., time cards and piece work tickets." Payroll registers, pay dates, and rate records fall on the three-year clock. The time cards, schedules, and timesheets the payroll numbers were computed from fall on the two-year clock.

The simple policy is to keep both for three years. Digital time records take no space, and a time card you threw away at month 25 leaves you unable to show how a payroll figure at month 30 was calculated. If your state sets a longer period, the state period applies.

04

The four gaps that show up in field crews

A crew that starts at the yard, drives to two sites, and eats lunch on the tailgate has four predictable record gaps.

Unrecorded yard time. The crew meets at the shop at 6:30, loads the truck, and clocks in at the site at 7:15. The 45 minutes at the yard and on the road were work time, and there is no record of them. 29 CFR 785.11 (read September 8, 2026) says "Work not requested but suffered or permitted is work time." If you know or have reason to believe the work is being done, it is hours worked and must be paid, punch or no punch. We cover this in Off-the-Clock Work: Yard Time, Truck Loading, and Other Hours You Probably Owe.

Auto-deducted lunches that were worked. A 30-minute deduction applied to every shift over 6 hours is a policy rather than a record of what happened on a given day. On the day the pour ran through noon and nobody stopped, the deduction turned 30 minutes of hours worked into unpaid time. The risks and the safer setups are in Auto-Deducting Lunch Breaks: Legal, but Risky.

Drive time missing. The crew clocks out at the first site at 11:50 and in at the second site at 12:40. The 50-minute drive between job sites is work time, and the record shows a gap. Over a week that is several hours missing from the daily totals and possibly from the overtime count.

Edits with no trail. A foreman fixes a punch in the spreadsheet on Friday and the original is gone. The number may be right, but there is no way to show what changed, who changed it, or why. How to Prove Hours Worked covers what a defensible record looks like.

05

A 30-minute self-audit

Pick one recent pay period and do this once a quarter. It takes about half an hour for a small crew.

1. 1Pull the time records for one pay period and the payroll register for the same period.
2. 2Pick three workers and compare the daily hours on the time record with the hours paid for each day. Any difference needs an explanation you can write down.
3. 3Confirm the overtime was computed on each workweek's total, not on the pay period's total.
4. 4For each worker, find the earliest punch of each day and ask whether the day started earlier at the yard.
5. 5Find every shift with an automatic lunch deduction and ask the foreman whether the crew actually stopped that day.
6. 6Find every gap between two job sites and check whether the drive was recorded as work time.
7. 7Find every edited shift and confirm the record shows the original time, the new time, who made the change, and when.
8. 8Confirm you can produce these records for the last three years of payroll and two years of time cards, including for workers who have left.

If step 2 shows differences you can't explain, or steps 4 to 7 turn up a pattern, fix the process first and then correct the pay. A written policy that the clock starts at the yard, that lunch is logged rather than assumed, and that drives between sites stay on the clock closes three of the four gaps.

06

What this looks like in Clox

Every punch is recorded to the minute from the worker's phone, and a worker can switch jobs mid-shift without clocking out, so the drive between sites stays on the clock under its own job code. Overtime thresholds are set per employee, daily and weekly, and the org-wide rule set is Standard (weekly) or California (daily overtime, double time, and meal-break review). Auto-lunch deduction is a floor: if the worker logged a break, Clox deducts only the part they did not log.

On the Reports page you set a date range and choose Summary or Detailed, h:mm or decimal, and the columns you want. The column list includes Start, End, Breaks, Lunch, Regular, Overtime, Double-time, pay amounts, notes, certified, and meal-break review. The CSV and Excel files carry one row per shift, and the PDF is a complete record per employee for the period. These are export records you can pull for a workers' comp or DOL audit; the workers' comp audit prep post uses the same files. The formats are in the reports and exports docs.

A manager can correct a shift, add one the worker never clocked, or reject one with a reason the worker sees. Every change is written to an audit log, so the trail missing in the fourth gap above exists by default. An approved shift is locked until a manager reopens it.

For a dispute where the other side wants to check the record themselves, the Proof of Presence export is a signed, hash-chained copy of the punches that anyone can verify at getclox.com/verify. It proves the record has not been altered since it was captured. It does not prove that a GPS reading was true, since location comes from the worker's phone.

07

FAQ

If an investigator has already contacted you, talk to an employment attorney before you respond. This is general information, not legal advice.

Clox is free for 14 days with no credit card, and a 30-day money-back guarantee covers the first paid subscription. Start a free trial, run one pay period through it, and pull the PDF to see what a complete record for each worker looks like.