The EEO-1 Reports Deadline is Fast Approaching
If you’re in charge of submitting employee pay data for 2018, that deadline is fast approaching. Employers have until May 31 to file 2018 EEO-1 reports, though it’s unclear whether that includes pay data for the current filing period.
Revised EEO-1 Requirements
All businesses with at least 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 employees and federal government contracts worth $50,000 or more are required to file an EEO-1 form that identifies employees by job category, race, sex and ethnicity – data that is used by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to analyze employment patterns and enforce civil rights to ensure sufficient employment of women and minorities. The form was revised during the Obama administration, but its pay-data provisions were suspended in 2017 by President Trump. Critics contend the data collect doesn’t provide sufficient information about pay disparities in the workplace. Challenges by worker-advocacy groups prompted a federal judge to lift the ban on March 4, but this left the question of data collection unclear while the issue worked its way through the courts. In a status update filed April 3, 2019, the government informed the court that EEOC could complete collection of the required EEO-1 pay data by September 30, 2019, but only if it utilized a third party data collector to do so. Now we must wait for a federal ruling on whether this plan is acceptable.
In the meantime, covered employers are urged to be proactive in assessing their payroll capabilities and assume that this payroll data will be required. Gathering the data will be a huge task for some employers, so it’s a wise idea to gather your internal resources and start thinking about managing your database effectively in order to obtain this data and pull it into the right format.
The revised EEO-1 form requires reporting wage information from Box 1 of the W-2 form and total hours worked for all employees, sorting information by race, sex and ethnicity within 12 proposed pay bands. Reported hours worked should show actual hours by nonexempt employees, an estimated 20 hours per week for part-time exempt employees and 40 hours per week for full-time exempt employees. Data integration may prove challenging, so you might want to consider collaborating with your vendors, especially if you are utilizing multiple databases. Even though it looks like the deadline will be extended to the end of September, until there is a firm ruling it’s best to be as prepared as possible – and certainly not too early to start gathering that data.