August 30, 2017
On Aug. 29, 2017, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) Acting Chair Victoria Lipnic announced that the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) is initiating a review and immediate stay of the new EEO-1 pay reporting requirements scheduled to take effect with the next filing cycle in March 2018.
As previously reported (see “EEOC’s Revised Annual Collection of Pay Data on EEO-1 Forms”), in 2016 EEOC revised the standard race and gender EEO-1 data reports that certain employers with 100 or more employees must submit annually to the federal government. These revisions required each covered employer to:
The extreme administrative burden and expense caused by the new pay reporting obligations has been the source of much debate in the business community. As Chairwoman Lipnic stated on Aug. 3, 2017 (see “Acting EEOC Chair Addresses Status of EEO-1 Reporting Changes, Other Issues”), the new EEO-1 “pay transparency” report is “the poster child for the kind of regulation that the president campaigned against.” Chairwoman Lipnic also noted that, given this, she sent a memorandum to the new head of OIRA, Neomi Rao, stressing that “time is of the essence” if the pay reporting requirement is to be suspended pending further review.
Acting on this request, on Aug. 29, 2017, the EEOC announced that OIRA Administrator Rao informed the EEOC “via a memo” that OMB “is initiating a review and immediate stay of the effectiveness of the pay data collection aspects of the EEO-1 form that was revised on September 29, 2016, in accordance with its authority under the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).”
According to OMB, the stay is based, in part, on the following:
This is excellent news for employers and comes before the start of the new 2017 EEO-1 reporting “snapshot” period, which is helpful. Thus, in light of the EEO-1 pay reporting stay, employers should note the following:
Should you have any questions about the EEO-1 pay reporting suspension or federal employment compliance obligations generally, please contact the author, your McGuireWoods contact, or a member of the firm’s affirmative action or labor and employment teams.