NT Lakis lawyers filed written comments this week with the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on changes proposed by the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) to the various letters the agency uses for scheduling federal contractors for compliance evaluations under the laws OFCCP enforces. OMB approval of OFCCP’s proposed changes is required under the federal Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) before they can go into effect.
OFCCP had initially proposed significant changes to both its standard scheduling letter and its focused review letter that would have substantially increased the burden on federal contractors at the desk audit stage of a compliance review. OFCCP subsequently withdrew the major proposed changes to the standard scheduling letter, and the version of the letter submitted to OMB for approval is essentially unchanged from the current version.
In contrast, however, the revised “focused review” scheduling letter submitted to OMB retains some of the added burdensome provisions, including the requirement to provide applicant- and employee-level employment activity data by job title and job group (rather than summary headcounts), as well as employee-level compensation data.
Accordingly, our comments to OMB zero in on the proposed changes to the focused review letter, arguing that because OFCCP has yet to complete any focused reviews using the existing focused review scheduling letter (which OMB approved only a few months ago), OFCCP’s proposed changes are premature, as there is no way to know whether the existing (and much less burdensome) focused review letter is achieving the desired result.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here