Employers subject to EEO-1 reporting were relieved to learn that the controversial new pay data reporting requirement for this year’s EEO-1 report was recently suspended. The revisions would have required employers, for the first time, to report wage information and hours worked for all employees by race, ethnicity, and sex within 12 pay bands in their annual EEO-1 reports. The mandate was widely criticized for being administratively burdensome and ineffectual to achieve its stated purpose of identifying systemic pay discrimination. On August 29, 2017, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced that the pay data reporting requirement would be immediately stayed pending review.
The longstanding requirement to report the race, ethnicity, and sex of employees by job category, however, remains in effect, as does the newly extended deadline of March 31, 2018 for the 2017 report. This means that employers subject to EEO-1 reporting—including employers with 100 or more employees, and employers with 50 or more employees and a federal contract or subcontract amounting to at least $50,000—must submit race, ethnicity, and sex data by the new deadline, using a “workforce snapshot period” between October 1 and December 31, 2017. EEO-1 data is typically submitted on the EEO-1 Survey portal, https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/, which states that previous filers will receive notification letters approximately two months before the March 31, 2018 filing deadline. Relatedly, federal contractors required to file the VETS 4212 form should note that the deadline for that form has been extended to November 15, 2017, to accommodate employers impacted by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.