17.4 Mandatory Postings, Employee Notices & Agency Reporting Obligations

17.4 Mandatory Postings, Employee Notices & Agency Reporting Obligations

Executive Summary: The HRCI exam content outline devotes an entire Functional Area 05 responsibility to monitoring, displaying, and distributing required posters and notices — naming change of relationship, wage and hour, and safety as examples — and a Functional Area 02 responsibility to new hire reporting. These are pure recall items with unforgiving deadlines, and they are among the cheapest violations for an agency to prove: an inspector either sees the poster on the wall or does not.

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The Three Distinct Duties

California HR practitioners routinely conflate obligations that the statutes treat as entirely separate. Satisfying one never satisfies another.

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Part 1: The Required Posting Set

Department of Industrial Relations Postings — All Employers

• Industrial Welfare Commission Wage Order — the specific order governing the employer's industry or occupation. Posting the wrong order is itself a violation, and no order at all destroys the employer's ability to rely on Wage Order provisions in a dispute.
• Minimum Wage notice (MW series) — reissued whenever the statewide rate changes, which is now every January 1 under the Labor Code § 1182.12 indexing mechanism.
• Payday Notice (Labor Code § 207) — must specify the regular paydays and the time and place of payment.
• Safety and Health Protection on the Job — the Cal/OSHA rights poster.
• Emergency Phone Numbers.
• Whistleblower Protections — Labor Code § 1102.8(a) requires the employee rights summary and the Attorney General's whistleblower hotline number to be displayed in lettering larger than 14-point type. The type-size requirement is a tested detail.
• Paid Sick Leave — Labor Code § 247 poster explaining accrual, usage, and anti-retaliation rights.
• Notice to Employees — Injuries Caused by Work and the workers' compensation carrier notice identifying the carrier or self-insured status.
• Access to Medical and Exposure Records — employers using hazardous or toxic substances.
• No Smoking signage.

Conditional and Agency-Specific Postings

• Cal/OSHA Form 300A Annual Summary — employers with 11 or more employees must post the certified summary from February 1 through April 30 each year, even in a year with zero recordable injuries (see section 12.3).
• EDD "Notice to Employees" (DE 1857A) — confirms the employer is registered with the EDD and that employees may be eligible for unemployment insurance, State Disability Insurance, and Paid Family Leave.
• Civil Rights Department postings — the CRD-E07P discrimination and harassment notice and the CRD-E04P pregnancy rights notice, with the 10% workforce language rule requiring translated posting wherever at least 10% of the workforce at a facility speaks a language other than English as a primary language (see section 14.3).
• Farm labor contractor and barbering and cosmetology postings for licensed operations.

Remote and Electronic Posting — Labor Code § 1207 (SB 657)

Employers may distribute required postings by email to employees. Critically, SB 657 provides that electronic distribution supplements and does not replace the obligation to physically display the postings at a worksite. An employer with a physical facility must do both; the email path is what reaches teleworkers who never enter the building.

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Part 2: The SB 294 Workplace Know Your Rights Act

Effective in 2026, SB 294 creates a materially new distribution obligation that is distinct from every poster above.

• What: a stand-alone written notice — it may not be buried inside a handbook or an onboarding packet — summarizing employee rights regarding workers' compensation benefits, immigration enforcement and unfair immigration-related practices, the right to organize and engage in protected concerted activity, and constitutional rights when interacting with law enforcement at the workplace.
• Who receives it: every current employee, each new employee upon hire, and where applicable the employee's authorized representative such as an exclusive bargaining representative.
• When: by February 1, 2026 and annually thereafter.
• How: through a channel the employer normally uses for employment-related communications — personal service, email, or text message — provided it can reasonably be expected to reach the employee within one business day.
• Language: in the language the employer normally uses to communicate business information with the employee; if the Labor Commissioner's template is unavailable in that language, English suffices.
• Companion duty: employers must allow employees to designate an emergency contact to be notified if the employee is arrested or detained at work or during work hours.

The Labor Commissioner publishes and updates the model notice annually, so this is a recurring calendar item rather than a one-time project.

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Part 3: Individual Notices at Separation and Leave

The exam content outline names "change of relationship" specifically. The relevant package:

[!CAUTION] The change-in-relationship notice is triggered by a leave of absence and by a change in status, not merely by termination. Employers that issue it only on separation routinely miss it when an employee goes out on an unpaid leave or moves from full-time to part-time — exactly the fact pattern the exam uses.

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Part 4: Agency Reporting — New Hires and Independent Contractors

New Employee Registry — Form DE 34

California requires every employer to report newly hired and rehired employees to the EDD's New Employee Registry, which supports child support enforcement.

• Deadline: within 20 calendar days of the employee's start-of-work date, defined as the first day services were performed for wages.
• Required data: employer EDD account number, federal employer identification number, business name and address; and the employee's full name, Social Security number, home address, and start-of-work date.
• Filing methods: e-Services for Business, mail, or fax. An employer may substitute a federal Form W-4 or state Form DE 4 if the additional required fields are added.
• Penalties: $24 per unreported employee for a late or missing report, rising to $490 where the failure results from an intentional agreement between employer and employee to withhold or falsify required information.

Independent Contractor Reporting — Form DE 542

• Who reports: any business or government entity required to file a federal Form 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC for a service provider who is an individual, sole proprietor, or single-member LLC. Corporations and partnerships are outside the requirement.
• Trigger: paying $600 or more, or entering into a contract for $600 or more, in a calendar year — whichever occurs first.
• Deadline: within 20 days of that trigger.
• Penalties: $24 per failure to report timely absent good cause, and $490 where the failure is intentional or the report is falsified.

The DE 542 obligation is a quiet but significant misclassification tripwire: an employer that reports a worker on a DE 542 has created a contemporaneous state record of treating that worker as a contractor, which the DLSE and EDD will read against the ABC test discussed in section 5.2.

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Part 5: Building a Defensible Posting and Notice Audit

1. Inventory by worksite, not by company. Posting duties attach to each physical location, including a single-employee satellite office.
2. Calendar the fixed dates: January 1 (minimum wage poster reissue), February 1 (SB 294 annual notice; Form 300A posting begins), April 30 (Form 300A posting ends), and the annual Labor Commissioner and CRD poster refreshes.
3. Test the language question at each facility. Run the 10% primary-language analysis per facility, not enterprise-wide.
4. Run a parallel electronic set for remote employees under Labor Code § 1207, and document the distribution.
5. Keep proof of distribution, not just proof of possession. For individually delivered notices, retain the acknowledgment or the transmission record — in a wage claim or a PAGA notice, the absence of a distribution record functions as an admission.

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Common Exam Traps

[!WARNING] Exam Trap 1: Treating email posting as a substitute. Labor Code § 1207 permits electronic distribution in addition to, never instead of, physical display at a worksite. An employer that took its posters down after emailing them is in violation.

[!WARNING] Exam Trap 2: Reading the change-in-relationship notice as a termination-only document. Unemployment Insurance Code § 1089 requires it immediately on layoff, leave of absence, or change in status as well.

[!WARNING] Exam Trap 3: Confusing the DE 34 and DE 542 clocks. Both run 20 days, but the DE 34 clock starts at the employee's start-of-work date, while the DE 542 clock starts at the earlier of paying $600 or contracting for $600 — a date that can precede any work being performed.