Payroll registers, records of employment, tax slips and the employment contract, read together as a continuous series. A human-resources letter summarising years of service is a summary of those records and cannot stand in for them where a date is genuinely in question.
Payroll evidence, not a summary letter
The useful test is whether a stranger could reconstruct the employment history from the documents alone, without being told the conclusion first. That means pay records covering every month claimed, a contract identifying the employer entity by its legal name, and tax documentation that agrees with both. Where there is a gap, the gap should be explained on the face of the file rather than left for an officer to notice. Whether an approved statutory leave interrupted employment or merely interrupted attendance is a question that the contract and the payroll answer, and it deserves an answer before the petition asserts a date.
Hypothetical example: a shipping and customs manager at a lumber remanufacturing plant near Roxton Pond is proposed for transfer, and the draft petition relies on a letter stating she has been employed since 2019. The payroll register shows an eleven-month parental leave inside the qualifying window, which the letter never mentions. The right response is neither to hide it nor to abandon the plan, but to obtain the leave documentation, establish whether the employment relationship continued throughout, and select a qualifying window that the records actually support. A letter and a payroll register that disagree do more damage together than either would alone.