hrc blog
EEOC Announces Additional EEO-1 Requirements
On January 28, 2016, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) shared plans to require employers with 100 or more employees to report employee pay data in September 2017 EEO-1 Reports in an effort to uncover potential pay discrimination.
The EEO-1 Report – formally known as the "Employer Information Report" – is a form requiring employers to provide a count of their employees by job category and then by ethnicity, race, and gender. The EEO-1 Report must be filed by employers who employ 100 or more employees, and employers with federal government contracts of $50,000 or more and 50 or more employees. The EEO-1 Report must be filed annually with the EEOC by September 30.
According to an article by Atkinson, Andelson, Loya, Ruud & Romo (dated March 9, 2016), "Under the new proposal, beginning in September 2017, employers with 100 or more employees would be required to also collect, and provide to the EEOC, data on employees' W-2 earnings and hours worked. Employees with 50 to 99 employees will not be subject to the new requirement, but must continue to collect and report ethnicity, race, and sex data...with regard to confidentiality, the EEOC stated that it will only publish aggregate data in a manner that does not reveal any particular employer's data and protect the confidential information to the maximum extent possible under the Freedom of Information Act."
The EEOC proposes to use total W–2 earnings as the measure of pay and will require collection of the total number of hours worked by employees. However, the EEOC is not proposing to require employers to collect additional data on hours worked by exempt employees, to the extent that employers do not currently maintain such records.
The EEOC intends to finalize the reporting requirements by September 2016, after a public comment period on the proposed regulations runs out on April 1, 2016. Employers which will be subject to the new pay data reporting requirements should consider taking measures now to ensure employee data and human resources information systems are capable of compiling and reporting the data starting in 2017.