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The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission\u00a0announced<\/a> that it will require employers with 100 or more employees to include compensation data in their annual EEO-1 reports. Employers will be required to provide this information regardless of whether they are federal contractors, as long as they meet the 100-employee threshold.<\/p>\n The EEOC says that it will use this information to identify compensation discrimination in the workplace and, more generally, to combat \u201cwage gaps\u201d based on race, ethnicity, or sex. The Agency will also periodically publish wage reports using aggregated data.<\/p>\n In addition to requiring compensation data, the new requirement significantly changes the timetable to which employers have become accustomed.<\/p>\n Currently, employers who are required to do EEO-1 reporting take a \u201csnapshot\u201d of the race, ethnicity, and sex of their work forces in each of the 10 EEO-1 categories during a pay period in July, August, or September, and report that by September 30.<\/p>\n Under the new timetable, the snapshot period will change to a pay period in October, November, or December, and the information (which will include compensation information, discussed in more detail below) must be reported by March 31 of the\u00a0following<\/em>\u00a0year.<\/p>\n What that means is that, once you send off your 2016 EEO-1 data today, you are done until the last calendar quarter of 2017, and you won\u2019t have another EEO-1 report to file until March 31, 2018.<\/p>\n (Yes, that\u2019s right \u2013 you will not have to file an EEO-1 report during calendar year 2017. At all.)<\/p>\n Employees within each of the 10 EEO-1 categories will be grouped into 12 pay bands based on their W-2 compensation. According to the EEOC, use of pay bands will be less burdensome for employers and will also provide more meaningful pay data to the EEOC. In addition to the number of employees (by race, ethnicity, and sex) in each pay band, employers will be required to state the number of hours worked. If employees are exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act, then the employer may use 40 hours as a \u201cproxy.\u201d (Or 20 hours if the exempt employee is part-time.) Employers may, if they prefer, use actual hours. For non-exempt employees, the reportable hours must be what appears in their payroll records, including any overtime.<\/p>\n The reports will be filed electronically on the EEOC\u2019s EEO-1 Online Filing System.<\/p>\n Title VII prohibits the EEOC from disclosing any information provided by an employer until a \u201cTitle VII proceeding has begun involving the information.\u201d In its July 2016 amended proposal, the EEOC said that \u201cproceeding\u201d means an actual lawsuit based on the information provided by the employer. The Agency also says that it will not share the compensation information with other federal agencies or law enforcement unless they enter into a Memorandum of Understanding and agree to comply with the Title VII non-disclosure\u00a0requirement. The EEOC will not share the information with state fair employment practices agencies unless the state agencies agree not to make the information public.<\/p>\n If the employer is a federal contractor, the information may be disclosed by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, but the OFCCP will first give\u00a0the contractor a chance to object. If the contractor\u2019s objection is well founded (in the opinion of the OFCCP), then the OFCCP will not disclose the information. If the OFCCP gets a FOIA request relating to an employer that is not a federal contractor, then the EEOC\u2019s strict non-disclosure rule applies. The EEOC specifically says in the July proposal that it will deny any request for \u201cdisaggregated\u201d information about an employer who is not a federal contractor. (\u201cAggregated\u201d information \u2014 that is, information about multiple employers \u2014 can be disclosed.)<\/p>\n Employers with 99 or fewer employees who are not federal contractors or subcontractors are not required to file EEO-1 reports at all. Federal contractors or subcontractors with fewer than 50 employees also are not required to file EEO-1 reports. This will continue under the new rule.<\/p>\n Federal contractors with 50-99 employees will continue to report race, ethnicity, and sex for each EEO-1 category, but will not have to report compensation information.<\/p>\n The EEOC issued its proposed rule on EEO-1 reporting in February 2016, in honor of the seventh anniversary of the\u00a0Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act<\/a>. Under\u00a0the February proposed rule<\/a>, September 30 would have continued as the reporting date. However,\u00a0the EEOC issued an amended proposal in July 2016<\/a>, primarily to change the reporting date to March 31 for the preceding calendar year. The EEOC changed the date because it will require W-2 compensation to be reported, and it was believed \u2013 probably correctly \u2013 that March 31 would be more convenient for employers because it coincided with tax time.<\/p>\n The EEOC has not yet issued a Final Rule on its proposal \u2013 all it did was announce on its website yesterday that it was going to require employers to comply with the proposed rule as amended in July. However, with no employer obligations until October 2017, the Agency has plenty of time to issue a Final Rule. According to an article today in\u00a0Law360<\/em>, the rule will be issued imminently.<\/p>\n The EEOC has a Q&A\u00a0here<\/a>, and a small business fact sheet\u00a0here<\/a>. A sample of the new EEO-1 form is available\u00a0here<\/a>. The Agency will also conduct free webinars on the EEO-1 reporting on October 20 and October 26.<\/p>\n This new EEO-1 reporting requirement, which is not limited to entities that have chosen to do business with the federal government, is going to be a significant burden and intrusion with \u2013 in all likelihood \u2013 very little countervailing benefit.<\/p>\n The \u201cgender pay gap\u201d exists, but it is far from established that the gap is a result of discrimination. The \u201cpay gap\u201d compares the average pay of\u00a0all women in the workforce<\/em>\u00a0with the average pay of\u00a0all men in the workforce<\/em>. It does not control for type of position held, geography, career ambition, family responsibilities, education, type of employer, length of employment, gaps in employment, era in which one entered the workforce, or anything else that might legitimately affect pay. Indeed,\u00a0even the government\u2019s own economists admit that they can\u2019t show the gap is due to discrimination<\/a>. The Agency also fails to acknowledge the\u00a0studies that show the pay gap is probably due to other factors<\/a>.<\/p>\n Moreover, data that do not control for anything more than \u201cpay band,\u201d hours worked, EEO-1 category, and race\/ethnicity\/sex is very unlikely to provide the EEOC with meaningful information about pay discrimination. Alternatively, it could result in frivolous charges or \u201cinquiries\u201d of employers about pay gaps that are easily, and legitimately, explainable.<\/p>\n That having been said, employers should do what they can to ensure that they are paying employees equitably. Many states have enacted equal pay legislation that is more aggressive than the federal requirements. The coming year provides a good opportunity for employers to conduct a thorough compensation audit before the beginning of the new EEO-1 \u201csnapshot\u201d period. At a minimum, employers should do the following:<\/p>\n *Identify any disparities that appear to be correlated with race, sex, or ethnicity.<\/strong>\u00a0Look at employees in the same job, but because the trend seems to be \u201ccomparable worth\u201d rather than \u201cequal pay for equal work,\u201d it\u2019s a good idea to also compare employees who perform arguably \u201csimilar\u201d work as well.<\/p>\n *Where an apparent disparity has a valid explanation, make sure you have gathered the documentation necessary to explain it to the EEOC or other government agency \u2013 or a plaintiff\u2019s lawyer.<\/strong><\/p>\n *Where an apparent disparity does not have a valid explanation, work on correcting the disparity and determine how to explain the correction to the affected employee.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Originally published by ThinkHR – Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission\u00a0announced that it will require employers with 100 or more employees to include compensation data in their annual EEO-1 reports. Employers will be required to provide this information regardless of whether they are federal contractors, as long as they meet the 100-employee threshold. The EEOC says that it will use this … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,43,23],"tags":[10,74,9,94,107,106,11,108,26,27,6,99,95],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-compliance","category-employee-benefits","category-human-resources","tag-blog","tag-compensation","tag-compliance","tag-deadline","tag-eeo-1","tag-eeoc","tag-employee-benefits","tag-equal-pay","tag-hr","tag-human-resources","tag-missouri-employee-benefits","tag-reporting","tag-springfield-benefit-advisors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":150,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/myebdbenefits.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}New timetable<\/h1>\n
What must be reported<\/h1>\n
How to report<\/h1>\n
Confidentiality<\/h1>\n
Smaller employers<\/h1>\n
History of the rule<\/h1>\n
EEOC resources<\/h1>\n
Analysis<\/h1>\n