Under former Director Patricia Shiu, who served as the Director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) from 2009 until her departure in November 2016, OFCCP on average wrote about 47% more violations for recordkeeping and a whopping 395% more violations for insufficient recruitment efforts than during the tenure of her predecessor Charles James.
With regard to discrimination violations, the agency wrote about 56% more overall with just an 8.30% increase in hiring violations, but an increase in promotion violations of over 600%, an over 800% increase in termination violations, and a 278% increase in compensation violations.
After Ms. Shiu’s departure, Deputy Director Thomas Dowd temporarily took the helm as Acting Director of OFCCP for the next 14 months, focusing enforcement personnel on clearing “aged” audits and initiating new audits primarily from previously generated audit lists, some dating as far back as 2010.
In December 2017, Ondray Harris was appointed as the Trump Administration’s new, permanent OFCCP Director. Although it is still early in his tenure, there are already concrete signs signaling that Director Harris has a very different vision than Ms. Shiu for the agency’s enforcement policy, practice, and priorities.
Given the recent change in leadership at the agency, NT Lakis lawyers have summarized OFCCP’s published enforcement data dating back to the beginning of Ms. Shiu’s tenure. The data provide some interesting insights into Director Harris’s enforcement priorities, whether and to what extent changes have been implemented so far, and what federal contractors might expect going forward.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.