Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proposes adding pay information to the annual data it requires from employers with more than 100 employees.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission proposes adding pay information to the data it collects from employers with more than 100 employees.

(Feb. 3, 2016) The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has proposed revising the Employer Information Report (EEO-1) to include the collection of data on employees’ W-2 earnings and hours worked, starting with the 2017 reporting cycle.. The revised form is intended to assist the agency in identifying possible pay discrimination.

Employers with more than 100 employees are required to file the form each September. Employers subject to EEO-1 filing requirements must report on employees’ ethnicity, race and sex, by job category. The proposed revision to the EEO-1 would add a complex system requiring employers to report aggregated W-2 data in 12 “pay bands” for the 10 EEO-1 job categories, rather than on individual employees’ pay.

The National Restaurant Association believes the revision has the potential to place a huge administrative burden on employers and would be regulatory overkill.

The EEOC says its goal is to use wage data to highlight earnings gaps and better enforce federal laws prohibiting pay discrimination. The agency has proposed working with the Labor Department to develop software that lets investigators “highlight statistics of interest” that could flag potential instances of discrimination.

President Obama announced the proposal on January 29 at a White House ceremony marking the seventh anniversary of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.  The public has until Apr.1, 2016 to submit comments on the proposal.

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