Employers with more than 100 workers have to meet a Sept. 30, 2019 deadline to report detailed information on how they compensate workers – broken down by gender, race, and ethnicities – to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The data is part of the EEO-1 form that employers have been required to file for years. There are now two components to the form:
Component 1 – This information includes the number of employees who work in a business, broken down by category, race, sex, and ethnicity. The deadline for submitting this information was May 31. This is the same information employers have been filing for years.
Component 2 – This newly required information includes hours worked and pay data from employees’ W-2 forms, broken down by race, ethnicity, and sex. This is due by Sept. 30.
The second component, initiated by the Obama administration, was supposed to have taken effect in 2017, but after President Trump took office, he halted the roll-out of the rule, on the grounds that reporting such detailed salary information was a burden on companies.
Several worker-advocacy groups filed suit, challenging the hold on the pay-data collection provisions. On March 4, 2019, a federal judge lifted the stay and ordered the EEOC to start collecting the data.
Why does EEOC want the information?
The EEOC says the detailed information on salaries will help its investigators determine which of the discrimination complaints that it receives merit further processing.
The EEOC uses information about the number of women and minorities that companies employ to support civil rights enforcement and analyze employment patterns, according to the agency.
The basics of EEO-1
Businesses with at least 100 employees, and federal contractors with at least 50 employees and a contract of $50,000 or more with the federal government must file the EEO-1 form.
To accommodate the new rules, the EEOC has revised the form, which will require employers to report wage information from box 1 of the W-2 form and total hours worked for all employees by race, ethnicity and sex within 12 proposed pay bands (example: $24,440-$30,679 is one band) and 10 occupation bands (like professionals, technicians or salespeople).
Component 2 data
Here’s what you will need to include in the component 2 data:
- Pay data
Employers must identify the number of employees (based on a combination of race and sex) that fall within each of 12 compensation bands for each EEO-1 job category. Employers will not be required to submit names or Social Security numbers for any employee.
To identify the compensation band in which to count an employee, employers must use Box 1 of Form W-2. Employers may not use gross annual earnings instead of Form W-2’s Box 1 earnings. - Hours-worked data
Employers must list the total number of hours worked by employees (based on a combination of race and sex) within the same compensation band and job category.
What to do
The EEOC has created a web-based portal for filing the EEO-1 form along with instructions and fact sheets, all of which you can find here.
The portal will remain open until the Sept. 30 filing deadline. If you have not already received login information, you can do so on the portal page.
