The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been ordered to collect employee EEO-1 pay data by Sept. 30, 2019.
The court's ruling means that employers now have roughly four months to submit their 2017 and 2018 data for Component 2 of the EEO-1 form, which includes hours worked and pay information from employees' W-2 forms by race, ethnicity and sex.
Employers still have until May 31, 2019, to submit 2018 data for Component 1, which asks for the number of employees who work for the business by job category, race, ethnicity and sex.
Court case results in new deadline
The new mandate comes as a result of the case of "National Women's Law Center, et al. v. Office of Management and Budget," in which NWLC and other organizations argued that the OMB was required by a 2016 regulation to collect compensation data on the EEO-1 report. Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with the plaintiffs, and gave the EEOC until May 3 to decide whether to submit 2017 pay data along with the 2018 information by the Sept. 30 deadline, or submit 2019 pay data during the 2020 reporting period.
On May 3, EEOC released a statement confirming it had chosen the former option.
"EEO-1 filers should begin preparing to submit Component 2 data for calendar year 2017, in addition to data for calendar year 2018, by September 30, 2019, in light of the court's recent decision," the notice stated. "The EEOC expects to begin collecting EEO-1 Component 2 data for calendar years 2017 and 2018 in mid-July, 2019, and will notify filers of the precise date the survey will open as soon as it is available."
The same day this announcement was made, the Department of Justice also filed a Notice of Appeal. However, the DOJ made clear that the filing does not stay the district court's orders, and therefore does not have any effect on EEO-1 filers' obligations to submit Component 2 data by Sept. 30.
The court's decision and the following appeal also have no impact on the May 31 deadline for submitting Component 1 data from 2018. Filers should continue to use the currently open EEO-1 portal to submit.
The EEOC expects to begin collecting the Component 2 data by July 15, and says it will notify filers of the precise date the survey will open as soon as it is available.
Decision places burden on employers
According to the Society for Human Resource Management, arguments presented in the case did not focus much on the collection and reporting burden this new deadline places on employers.
Pulling EEO-1 data is relatively simple for Component 1, which only involves reporting the employer's number of workers by race, ethnicity and sex. Component 2, however, involves the collection of many more data points, including hours worked and pay information. Further complicating the matter is that employers must submit data not just for 2018, but for the past two years. This could prove especially difficult in the case of employees who only worked for part of 2017 or 2018, or employees that may have been reclassified to exempt or nonexempt.
Businesses with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 employees and a contract with the federal government of at least $50,000 are required to file the EEO-1 form. Employers may be able to seek an exemption from the EEOC if able to demonstrate that filing the information would cause an undue burden. It is likely that an exemption would only be granted in the case of smaller businesses, as larger organizations would not likely be able to show undue burden.
