Friday, February 7, 2020: Component 2 Pay Data Portal to Close
In a surprise twist, the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) and its co-plaintiffs in the EEO-1 Component 2 “hours worked” and “pay data” collection case joined with the defendants Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to file a joint status report to recommend to the Court that it allow the Commission to now shut the Component 2 reporting portal now that the Commission has received 89.2% of the Component 2 files available form eligible filers.
At the previous behest of the NWLC plaintiffs, the Court had repeatedly rebuffed the EEOC’s several formal requests to the Court seeking permission to shut down the EEOC’s Component 2 collection portal (costing the taxpayers about $150,000/week to remain open while gathering only small incremental percentages of additional Component 2 filings from late-filing eligible employers). However, the parties now agree that the “EEOC may wind down its collection of Component 2 data on the timetable of its choosing.” Accordingly, the parties have jointly requested the Court to deem the collection complete and to allow the EEOC Component 2 collection portal to close.
However, because the EEOC has numerous record keeping requirements potentially applicable to the Component 2 “hours worked” and “pay data” responses it has collected, Plaintiffs have requested information about the retention of the data, and should the EEOC decide NOT to retain the data, have requested they be notified of such decision at least 60 days before the disposal of the data.
Note 1: The EEOC’s record retention requirement for EEO-1 file data is one year (for electronically filed reports–which are the vast majority of currently filed EEO-1 reports, including the just completed Component 2 filings). After the first year of retention, the EEOC’s Office of Research, Information and Planning (ORIP) offers the original electronic submissions to the National Archives & Records Administration (NARA). NARA typically receives the nation’s electronic EEO-1 Survey Reports and permanently stores them. If the EEOC receives paper copy versions of an EEO-1 Report, it stores the original record for one year after which it converts the documents to microfilm storage (no kidding), disposes of the hard paper original and then disposes of the microfilm after ten years from receipt, apparently of the paper record.
NOTE 2: One can just smell the coming litigation over access to the Component 2 data the EEOC has now collected but does not intend to analyze, should President Trump win re-election in November. No one should imagine this drama is over. We strongly suspect that we will still be providing our readers updates on this and related stories a year from now…at least. Many twists in the winding future road lie ahead.Here is the history of recent Component 2 filings which brought the parties to the Component 2 litigation together, finally:
Date |
Filing Percentage |
2/6/20 |
89.2% |
1/24/20 |
87% |
1/3/20 |
86% |
12/31/19 |
85.1% |
9/25/19 |
39.7% |