The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently disclosed that employers filed more than 1.4 million Employer Information (EEO-1) reports in 2014, a number that far surpasses any previously published figures on the number of workplace locations subject to the compliance requirements enforced by the EEOC and other federal workplace regulators.
The information was revealed after NT Lakis lawyers – acting on behalf of the Equal Employment Advisory Council (EEAC) – submitted a request for the data in conjunction with the EEOC’s recently proposed EEO-1 revisions. If approved as proposed, those revisions would require covered employers to report their establishment-level headcount and hours-worked data by race/ethnicity, gender, EEO-1 job category, and pay band in a form that contains more than 3,660 data cells, versus the current 180.
Applying the newly disclosed number of EEO-1 reports filed in 2014 to the increased number of cells on the proposed EEO-1 report yields a staggering result. If the EEO-1 is approved as proposed, employers will be required to retrieve, calculate, review, analyze, and submit to the EEOC between 1.5 and 3.0 billion cells of data each year. In addition, the newly disclosed figure also raises serious questions about the true burden imposed on employers by the federal government’s equal employment opportunity and affirmative action regulatory, recordkeeping, and reporting requirements.
Members of the Equal Employment Advisory Council (EEAC) can read more here.