HR have lost important Identity document

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

To give some back ground, I'm English, working in France for a company of around 60 people and have been here for around 7 months.

I am in the process of applying for various administrative things (social security [necessary for current job], health care, french civil partnership [PACS] with the girlfriend), for these things I require translated copies of my British birth certificate. So when our HR director told me our company offered a translation service for this I was happy to accept, and save 60€ on translation costs.

I handed my birth certificate to our HR director in person and have never seen it again. I understand the document was scanned and sent to the translators (so should never have left the HR office). I've received the translation (cool), but I'm obviously concerned about the birth certificate (You seem to be able to apply for a huge amount with this in France, and I'm concerned about identity theft etc).

I was told about this yesterday when I went to pick up the translation and the original was not with the translated documents. Our conversations have been roughly:

Yesterday

Me: Thanks, do you have the original?

HR: No, do we still have the original?

Me: Yes

HR: OK let me look (searches office, my file, inbox on desk etc) I can't find it... I'll let you know immediately if I find it, but I think it's lost

This morning:

Me: So, did you find it?

HR: Sorry, no

Me: Are you really, really sure it's lost?

HR: Yes, I left it on my desk before going on holiday, maybe the cleaning lady binned it if it fell on the floor.

Clearly this is a summary, but this is roughly the highlights of the conversation.

I've talked to no one else about this. I'm unsure where to go from here, but to me there seems to be a fairly crucial failure in process here (Identity documents should surely be locked up if kept for more than a few hours/ definitely overnight?). Should I alert someone to this, and if so who (only the CEO is above HR dir as I understand), and should I make demands on my employer (cover cost of Experian or similar to make sure identity is not stolen), I imagine I should not talk about this to my colleagues? Or am I blowing this out of proportion and I should accept that this happens? Any other advice on this would be welcome.

manpreet 2 years ago

So the key question here is: what do you want to happen? Complaining for the sake of complaining doesn't really href="https://forum.tuteehub.com/tag/help">help. What are the href="https://forum.tuteehub.com/tag/specific">specific outcomes you want to achieve? Examples could be

1. You want HR to get slapped on the wrist so they don't do it again and you feel they deserve a slap.
2. You want HR to improve their polcies and procedures in handling these types of documents
3. You want the company to cover all expenses you incur in replacing the lost documents
4. You want a few days paid leave to cover the time you need to spend on this
5. You want the company to pay for an identify theft protection/monitoring program for a while, to make sure the lost documents doesn't get abused someplace.
6. Something else?

Your next steps and action depend on what exactly you want to achieve. Be clear about your goals first, than take action towards the href="https://forum.tuteehub.com/tag/specific">specific goal.