Earlier this year, this blog discussed the EEOC’s proposed rule that would require employers to report additional pay data as part of their annual “Employer Information Report EEO-1” (EEO-1) form submissions. The EEOC and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) use the EEO-1 form to collect data from private employers, federal contractors and subcontractors about their employees. It is an established report that all employers with 100 or more employees are required to submit to the EEOC on an annual basis. On September 29, 2016, the EEOC announced the approval of a revised EEO-1 form. Beginning with the 2017 report (which must be filed in March 2018), the EEOC will collect additional summary pay data that it had not previously collected from employers with 100 or more employees.

The previous form collected only information regarding the number of employees broken down by job category, race/ethnicity and gender. The revisions incorporated into the new regulations require two new types of information: pay bands and hours worked.

  1. Summary pay data: Employers will report the total number of full and part-time employees they had during that year in each of 12 pay bands listed for each EEO-1 job category; employers will not, however, be required to report individual pay or salaries.
  2. Aggregate hours worked data: Employers will be required to tally and report the total number of hours worked that year by all the employees accounted for in each pay band.

The EEOC also revised the timing of the “workforce snapshot period.” The “workforce snapshot period” is the moment in time during which the Employer counts its employees. For reporting years 2016 and before, the "workforce snapshot period" was July 1 to September 30. Starting with the EEO-1 report of 2017 data, however, the "workforce snapshot period" will be October 1 to December 31, 2017. An employer may choose any pay period during this three-month "workforce snapshot period" to count its full and part-time employees for the EEO-1 report.

The EEOC states that the new data will assist in evaluating pay discrimination and enforcement of law prohibiting such discrimination. In many cases, pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of information on employee pay. The hours reporting will help account for part-time and partial year employment.

The revisions have caused the EEO-1 form to grow from two to eight pages. A sample of the new form can be found by clicking here.

Obviously, the new form will require additional information and investigation, and likely will require significantly more time for employers to complete each year. Employers therefore are advised to review the form early to ensure that they are aware of the information requested and the proper teams/individuals with access to that information are identified. The 2017 reports will be due March 31, 2018. As the EEO-1 reports are a tool to assist the EEOC and OFCCP in its own pay discrimination enforcement activities, employers may also wish to conduct their own audits to assess (and possibly address) their risk ahead of the reporting.