I know you all have been waiting on pins and needles. No? Just me? Well, nonetheless the day has finally come. No I’m not talking about the apocalypse or the end of the world, though what I’m about to say may seem like it for some employers. I’m talking about the EEOC’s announcement regarding the current EEO-1 reporting period.
Around this time last month, we posted a blog informing employers of a federal D.C. Circuit opinion that brought back an Obama-era policy from the dead. Specifically, it revived the revised version of the EEO-1 form which places an additional requirement on employers to report their pay data. For more information on this please see our prior blog post “EEO-1 Employers Alert”. This was alarming considering the opinion was issued only weeks before the EEO-1 Survey portal was set to open.
The judge that issued the opinion gave the EEOC an April 3, 2019 deadline to update employers and other stakeholders of their obligations. In the eleventh hour, the EEOC has done just that. In a somewhat anticlimactic fashion, the EEOC AGREED with the court’s opinion but with a twist. Employers will not be required to franticly gather this data and submit by the May 31, 2019 deadline. But don’t get too excited. Though the EEOC will not delay the reporting of employer pay data until the next reporting period, it will be giving employers an extension until September 30, 2019 to submit data from “one single payroll period” of the employer’s choosing between October 1, 2018 and December 31, 2018.
While this may not have been the storybook ending that many of us were hoping for, be sure to reach out to your labor and employment attorneys for assistance complying with this new requirement before the September deadline.