One annoying task that employers have had to do over the past few years is to submit pay data to the EEOC. Thankfully, it looks like this is the last year they will have to do that. A couple of weeks ago the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that it will no longer require employers to submit EEO-2 pay data.
In 2016, the EEOC implemented a rule that required all private-sector employers with 100 or more employees to submit to the Agency a report describing the amount of money each employee is paid along with the number of hours the employee worked, the employee’s job category, and the employee’s ethnicity and gender.
Providing this information to the EEOC has been a huge undertaking. The EEOC’s Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics estimated the cost to employers of providing this data to be $614 million for the 2017 data and $622 million for the 2018 data. The cruel irony is that the Trump Administration’s EEOC didn’t even want to collect it, but was forced to by a federal judge.
On September 12, 2019, the EEOC posted a Notice of Information Collection declaring that in the future it will only ask for EEO-1 data, which is on demographic information, and not seek EEO-2 data, which is data on pay. This announcement does not affect the deadline to submit 2017 and 2018 pay data by September 30, 2019. And at least for now employers will need to continue to provide EEO-1 data, although the EEOC has dropped some hints that in the future it may not require employers to collect this either.
It goes without saying that pay discrimination is terrible, and we all want it to end. But this EEOC rule was not going to do that. It just made busywork for employers. It required them to report the number of employees within 12 “pay bands” in each of the 10 EE0-1 categories. It is not clear that this provided the EEOC with meaningful data. It did not control for anything other than the pay band the EEO-1 category. It is hard to see how this would determine whether there was pay discrimination occurring.
We will keep you updated on the status of providing EEO-1 data to the EEOC in the future. If you have questions about what you need to do to provide EEO-1 and EEO-2 data, let us know. You must submit it by September 30, so the clock is ticking.
