by H. Juanita M. Beecher, Fortney & Scott, LLC
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Get Your Report Now!The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced its revisions to its January proposal when it forwarded the proposal to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on July 13, 2016.
The major concession in the revised proposal is to move the proposed filing date to March 31 from the current September 30 date beginning March 31, 2018. With this change, the EEOC eliminated the need for a second W-2 report, which would have been a significant burden on employers. The change of the reporting date from September to March also required the workforce snapshot to be moved to a day between October 1 and December 31.
The EEOC also clarified the following:
- Employers are to report their employees' earnings based on Box 1 of the employees' W-2.
- For nonexempt employees, employers are to use the same definition of "hours worked" as that used by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which means paid-time-off hours will not be included in "hours worked."
- For exempt employees, employers can either (1) report actual time worked if that data is collected or (2) use 40 hours for full-time exempt employees or 20 hours for part-time employees.
In the revision, the EEOC outlined that:
- It will use the data for "early assessment of charges of discrimination" to examine "pay disparities based on job categories, pay bands and gender, ethnicity or race" at a particular employer where there are charges of discrimination; and
- It will aggregate the earnings and hours worked data across employers to publish reports on "pay disparities by race, sex, industry, occupational groupings and metropolitan statistical area," and the data will be used for training courses.
Finally, the EEOC outlined how it will keep the pay data confidential, reiterating that the OFCCP will hold EEO-1 data confidential to the maximum extent permitted by the Freedom of Information Act and the Trade Secrets Act. Interested parties have until August 15, 2016, to file comments.