Is there a deadline for DOLE to file a case over a labor law violation, or can it go after my business years later?

The general three-year prescriptive period

Article 290 sets a three-year clock on offenses penalized under this Code and the rules and regulations issued pursuant thereto — the ordinary run of labor standards violations that DOLE can act on. Once three years have passed from when the violation occurred, it can no longer be prosecuted as an offense under the Code, regardless of how serious it was or how long DOLE takes to discover it. This period exists to give businesses some certainty that liability for a past violation does not hang over them indefinitely; a business is not perpetually exposed to prosecution over conduct from years earlier.

The shorter, stricter deadline for unfair labor practices

Unfair labor practice cases follow a different and shorter rule. Article 290 requires that all unfair labor practice arising from Book V shall be filed with the appropriate agency within one (1) year from accrual of such unfair labor practice, and the consequence of missing that window is unusually severe: the claim is forever barred, not merely delayed. Anyone dealing with an unfair labor practice allegation should treat the one-year mark as an absolute cutoff, distinct from and considerably tighter than the three-year period that applies to labor offenses generally.

What counts as the starting point

Both periods run from when the violation or practice actually occurred, or in the case of unfair labor practice, from its accrual — not from when it was reported, discovered, or investigated. That distinction matters for a business trying to assess its exposure: a violation from four years ago falls outside the general three-year period even if a complaint was only recently filed, while an unfair labor practice more than a year old is barred outright. Keeping accurate records of when events actually happened is what lets you measure your exposure against these deadlines with any confidence.

What the article does not do is say who bears the burden of proving when the period began to run, or whether anything suspends it once started. Those are left to the rules that govern the proceeding itself.

An employee's own claim runs on a different clock

Article 290 is about offenses — prosecution under the Code and its rules — and about unfair labor practice. It is not the provision that governs what an employee can still recover. That sits in Article 291, under which all money claims arising from employer-employee relations accruing during the effectivity of the Code must be filed within three years from the time the cause of action accrued, and are otherwise forever barred. The two periods are the same length but they are not the same clock: they run from different events and are asserted in different forums. A business assessing its exposure should not read the lapse of the period for an offence as closing off a former employee's money claim, or the reverse. And nothing in either article stops an employee from raising, within the applicable period, a claim about conduct the State can no longer prosecute.

Related provisions

• Labor Code, Article 290 — Prescription Of Offenses
• Labor Code, Article 291 — Prescription Of Money Claims