The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced that it will push back to 2021 its annual collection of demographic data from private employers with 100 or more workers, the EEO-1 report. Unsurprisingly, the announcement was prompted by the current pandemic so as to “relieve employers of unnecessary burdens during the crisis.”

While normally data contained in the EEO-1 reports is collected every year, the EEOC’s decision means that both 2019 and 2020 data collection will be delayed until March 2021. And while the collection of Component 1 data – demographic information from employers on race, gender, and ethnicity by job category – will take place as usual in March 2021, Component 2 data – W-2 wage information and hours worked for employees within specified pay bands, a tool meant to identify illegal pay gaps – appears to be a non-issue at this point, as the EEOC previously announced it would not collect Component 2 pay data beyond the two years a federal court ordered it to collect.