This is an update to our March 28th post – EEO-1 Reporting Requirements Become More Onerous . . . Maybe.

Employers with 100 or more employees, and federal contractors with 50 or more employees, have until September 30, 2019 to file EEO-1 Component 2 pay data for calendar year 2018 with the Equal Employment Opportunity  Commission (“EEOC”). Component 1 demographic data, which includes identification of the number of employees by race, ethnicity, and sex, is still due to the EEOC on May 31, 2019.

In her Order, Judge Chutkan ordered the EEOC to notify filers via its website that the 2018 calendar year pay data collection must be submitted no later than September 30, 2019. The Court also gave the EEOC the option to either 1) collect Component 2 EEO-1 pay data for calendar year 2017, or 2) collect Component 2 EEO-1 data for 2019 during the 2020 EEOC reporting period. The EEOC must inform employers by May 3, 2019 whether it will be collecting either 2017 or 2019 pay data.

The Judge’s Order resolves any ambiguity regarding the reporting deadlines. The EEOC has always required employers with 100 or more employees to submit annual reports, known as “EEO-1” submissions, to the Commission. These reports are required to include data concerning the number of employees the company employs based on gender, race, and ethnicity. At two pages long, they were relatively straightforward and the data fairly easy to submit.

Increased Reporting Requirements

In September 2016, the EEOC, however, expanded the reporting obligation to include detailed wage and hour information broken down by gender, race, and ethnicity within 12 different pay bands for 10 different job classifications. This drastically increased the amount of information that employers needed to collect and report. If it wasn’t already, the EEO-1 form became an unequivocal burden. The new requirements were submitted to the federal Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”) and approved for employers to begin complying with in 2017.

New Requirements Called Off and Then Reinstated

Things changed again when the Trump administration took over. In August 2017, the OMB issued a stay of the new wage and hour reporting requirements, citing, among other things, that it was overly burdensome and “[did] not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues.”

In November 2017, several advocacy groups sued the administration and claimed that the OMB’s decision violated the federal Paperwork Reduction Act (“PRA”), and Administrative Procedures Act (“APA”), and asked that the OMB’s stay be lifted.

On March 4, 2019, the pendulum swung back when the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted the plaintiffs summary judgment and held that the OMB’s stay was not reasonable. On April 25, 2019, Judge Chutkan set forth the reporting deadlines, order for the EEO-1 Component 2 pay data to be filed by employers no later than September 30, 2019. The May 31, 2019 deadline for employers to submit EEO-1 Component 1 data remains in place.

We will continue to monitor the developments for any updates concerning employers’ responsibility to comply with these new changes to the EEO-1 reporting law.

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