Is is legal to withhold my employment reviews from me?
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Is is legal to withhold my employment reviews from me?
10 months ago I resigned from a position with a big telecom company. Recently I have tried applying for a job and they are requesting that I give them my sales numbers and reviews while employed with this company. They refuse to give me my reviews because it is “proprietary” info. Is this legal to withhold my own reviews?
Asked on September 6, 2011 under Employment Labor Law, Texas
Answers:
SJZ, Member, New York Bar / FreeAdvice Contributing Attorney
Answered 12 years ago | Contributor
It is absolutely legal, unfortuately. While the reviews may have been *of* you, they are not "your" reviews. They are business records belonging to the company (all personnel files belong to the company) and the company is under no obligation to share them. (Also, consider: "your" sales numbers are really the company's sales numbers for the territory you had; if the company shared them with another business, they would be giving away propritary information about their own sales and performance in that territory.) For whatever it's worth, I've worked for several companies that made extensive use of both employee and indepenent sales reps--none of them ever requested this information when hiring someone, because it is obviously competititve information. It may be that your prospective employer is more interested in what you can tell them about your former employer than in you.
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