For US employers with 100 or more employees, extensive new information relating to their prior EEO-1 filings must be submitted by September 30, 2019.  Specifically, in addition to categorizing employees by race/ethnicity, gender and job type, employers are now required to assemble and submit, with respect to each subcategory, aggregated employee data regarding compensation and annualized hours worked.  Assembling the required data may be much more complicated than many employers are expecting, so it is important to begin planning now.

What is the EEO-1?

For many years, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has required employers with 100+ employees to complete and file an EEO-1 form annually.  The EEO-1 was essentially a relatively simple demographic snapshot of the employer’s workforce, capturing the number of employees in each of several job categories by gender and by race/ethnicity.  The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) also has long required the EEO-1 for federal government contractors with at least 50 employees.

What is different this year?

Late in the Obama administration, the EEOC and OFCCP issued rules requiring employers to start providing additional information regarding compensation groupings and hours worked for each of the existing job, gender and race categories.  Before these rules were fully implemented, however, the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) halted the rules, asserting that the revisions were overly burdensome and created privacy concerns.  Private organizations, in turn, challenged the OMB action, and in March 2019, a federal court ordered the EEOC to move forward with collecting the new compensation and hours data (collectively referred to as “Component 2” data).  Following further court hearings, the EEOC established September 30, 2019, as the new deadline for submission of the data.

Who needs to worry about this?

Only employers with 100 or more employees need to submit the new Component 2 data.  (Most federal contractors with 50 to 99 employees still must submit the Component 1 data annually, but need not submit the Component 2 data.)

The 100-employee benchmark is not based on a particular establishment, but on the employer’s workforce as a whole.  All full-time and part-time employees must be counted for purposes of determining whether the employer meets the 100-employee threshold.  The 100-employee benchmark is determined by the number of employees as of the years 2017 and 2018, not the current number of employee.

Continue reading at:  Dentons