Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

We previously posted on the unfortunate ruling in March 2019, when a Federal Court reinstituted the “Component 2” wage reporting in the annual EEO-1 Report.  The highly controversial requirement – that employers annually report, to the government, W-2 earnings and hours worked for all employees – had been proposed in 2016, but stayed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 2017.

On May 3, 2019, the Department of Justice filed an appeal in the federal case, seeking to overturn the Court’s ruling that revived the wage report.  But, the appeal is unlikely to be decided prior to the September 30^th reporting deadline, and it does NOT stay or alter employers’ obligation to submit the Component 2 data.

The EEOC is has partnered with a non-partisan research organization, the NORC at the University of Chicago, to develop a system that can collect the voluminous data soon to be submitted by employers.  The EEOC has projected that a web-based portal will be active for this purpose around mid-July, 2019.

In the interim, the EEOC is lauching a Helpdesk to take questions from employers on this new and untested reporting process.  EEOC announced the Helpdesk would go live yesterday, on June 17, 2019.  The Helpdesk consists of an email and toll free phone number:  EEOCcompdata@norc.org; (877) 324-6214.

Employers should continue monitoring EEO-1 developments, but should expect to submit wage data by September 30^th.  And, since this process is new for both employers and the EEOC, companies should expect some technical challenges, and not wait until the last minute to test their submission readiness.  Employers  should assess their system capabilities, and do a test run of the necessary data pull and reportings.  And, companies should not hesitate to contact the EEOC Helpdesk with any questions.