As of this writing, there is still no word on when covered employers will be required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to file pay and hours worked data (“Component 2”) as part of their EEO-1 reporting.

A federal district court last month in effect reinstated controversial 2016 revisions to the EEO-1, including the addition of the pay and hours worked data collection requirements, that had been rescinded by the Trump Administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The final decision as to when employers will be required to file the Component 2 data currently rests with the court.

The EEOC has advised the court in a subsequent filing that the EEOC’s “Acting Chair has determined that it is necessary to … adjust the collection deadline to September 30, 2019, in order to accommodate the significant practical challenges for the EEOC to collect Component 2 data.”

In a related development, a coalition of business groups filed a “friend-of-the-court” brief with the court within hours of the EEOC’s filing, pointing out the practical challenges that would be imposed by requiring employers to report Component 2 data without allowing adequate time to prepare, stressing that a September 30 deadline would be impractical. 

In contrast, and not surprisingly, the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit challenging OMB’s decision to rescind the Component 2 data requirement argued in their own submission to the court that the EEOC should be ordered to develop a plan to open pay and hours worked reporting “sufficiently in advance” of May 31, 2019, or show cause why doing so is not possible.

On April 11, 2019, the judge scheduled a status hearing for April 16 on the parties submissions and has advised the EEOC and OMB that they should be prepared to testify. To reiterate, the final call on when employers will be required to file the Component 2 data in essence rests with the judge in this case, and she could issue a determination at any time following the April 16 status hearing with little or no advance notice.

Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.