Business owners should take note that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) recently proposed changes to the Employer Information Report, or EEO-1, that, if approved, would become effective beginning in September, 2017. Planned changes would affect all employers and federal contractors and subcontractors with more than 100 employees who are required to submit the current iteration of the EEO-1 form.
Proposed additions to the EEO-1 compliance survey would require employers to submit compensation data for all employees starting in September, 2017. The EEOC would use the new data to promote equal pay in the workplace and identify cases of possible pay discrimination.
Current EEO-1 regulations require employers with more than 100 employees and government contractors and subcontractors with more than 50 employees to collect information about employee race, gender, and ethnicity by job category. Should the proposed reporting requirements go into effect in September of next year, employers with more than 100 employees would also be required to provide information about Form W-2 earnings and hours worked by race, gender, and ethnicity. However, government contractors and subcontractors with 50 to 99 employees would not be required to submit the additional compensation data.
The proposed regulations were officially published in the Federal Register on February 1 of this year and will be available for public inspection and comment on the Federal Register website until April 1, 2016. Additionally, a public hearing was held on March 16, 2016 to collect additional information and open the matter to public comment.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits the EEOC from making public data collected from compliance surveys submitted by private employers. The statute does not apply to government contractors, although access to EEO-1 data for government contractors and subcontractors is available only by direct request through the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
The EEOC uses data collected from compliance surveys to track employment patterns, determine the representation of minority and female employees in industries and regions, and identify instances of systematic discrimination. The annual submission deadline for the EEO-1 is September 30; reports can be filed online.
More information, including links to the current and proposed EEO-1 forms, can be found on the EEOC website, http://www.eeoc.gov.
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