New EEO-1 Reporting Requirements

Attention Employers With 100 or More Employees, New EEO-1 Reporting Requirements Are Coming

Due to a recent federal court ruling, employers with 100 or more employees (and federal contractors with 50 or more employees) may soon have to report pay data as part of their annual EEO-1 reporting obligations. Thus, while the information that employers are required to report (by the May 31, 2019 deadline) is the same as previous years, it could very well be expanding next year.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act requires employers to provide the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) with certain information that is necessary for determining whether unlawful employment practices are being committed. Since 1966, the EEOC has required employers with 100 or more employees to report the number of employees they have by job category, sex, race, and ethnicity. In 2010, the Obama administration, as a way increasing enforcement of laws prohibiting pay discrimination, expanded these reporting requirements to include pay data. These new reporting requirements were slated to take effect in 2018. However, shortly after the Obama administration approved the expanded EEO-1 reporting requirements, the Trump administration suspended the rule because it believed that the new reporting requirements were “unnecessarily burdensome,” lacked “practical utility,” and did “not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues.” In response to the Trump administration’s decision to halt implementation, several advocacy groups sued the EEOC in an effort to reinstate the pay data reporting rule. Surprisingly, the federal judge that heard the case agreed with the advocacy groups and effectively reinstated the Obama-era pay data reporting rule. In short, the judge held that the Trump EEOC had failed to provide a “reasonable explanation” for halting the implementation of the new rule.

What This Means for Employers:

On March 18, 2019, the EEOC opened the portal for filing EEO-1 employment data (the portal can be accessed here). Noticeably absent from the EEO-1 reporting requirements is a call for employers to provide the pay data. So, at least for now, the court’s ruling does not appear to have changed the reporting requirements for this year (although the EEOC has provided very little guidance on this issue). In moving forward, it is too early to tell if employers will be required to provide pay data next year. The government is expected to appeal the court ruling, and the EEOC has not indicated how it intends to address the ruling. As such, employers need to be on the lookout for updates from the EEOC. Contact Barsamian & Moody at (559) 248-2360 if you have questions about your EEO-1 reporting requirements.

The goal of this article is to provide employers with current labor and employment law information. The contents should neither be interpreted as, nor construed as legal advice or opinion. The reader should consult with Barsamian & Moody at (559) 248-2360 for individual responses to questions or concerns regarding any given situation.