Dive Brief:
- A trio of Republican senators want the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to shut down an EEOC proposal that would compel many employers to submit summary pay data and hours worked categorized by employees' sex, race and ethnicity, according to Bloomberg BNA.
- Sens. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Johnny Isakson (Ga.), in a letter to the OMB released on Tuesday, said the EEOC's revised proposal to add the compensation data to the EEO-1 form would place "significant new burdens on businesses that can't be justified under the Paperwork Reduction Act."
- On Aug. 15, the EEOC closed down its 30-day comment period on the revised proposal, so the letter served as a final comment among those collected, BNA reports.
Dive Insight:
Under the EEOC's revised proposal, covered employers would report aggregate wage data based on W-2 forms along with actual hours worked across 12 pay bands in 10 job categories based on a “snapshot” in the final quarter of 2017, BNA reports. The first EEO-1 reports with the compensation data would be due March 31, 2018. The OMB received nearly 600 comments from citizens, business representatives, employee advocacy groups and unions responding to the EEOC's revised proposal, according to BNA.
The EEO-1 forms were shipped out to employers on Aug. 2.
While the EEOC's view is the new reporting will make pay equity easier to achieve, critics in the BNA article and elsewhere have consistently argued that the form is an onerous compliance process, especially for smaller employers. It appears the EEOC doesn't agree, and it's not clear how successful that Senate request to stop the EEO-1 process will be.
