EEOC Instructs Employers of New Sept 30th Deadline for Reporting Pay Data
A federal judge announced on April 25th that mid-size and large employers will now have until September 30, 2019 to provide 2018 pay data to the EEOC, instead of the previous deadline of May 31st.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan accepted the agency’s proposal to make employers submit their 2018 pay data this fall in a bench ruling and also ordered the EEOC to collect a second year of pay data, giving it a choice between collecting employers’ 2017 data or making it collect 2019 data down the road.
Judge Chutkan said she accepted the agency’s proposed due date “even though the court harbors its own doubts” about why it would take so long to collect pay data.
The judge gave the agency until April 29 to put a statement on its website informing employers of her decision and until May 3 to decide which second-year dataset (2017 or 2019) to collect. The agency must also give the court a compliance update on May 3 and provide further updates every 21 days after that and must take “all necessary steps” to meet the Sept. 30 deadline, she said.
Judge Chutkan’s decision Thursday ends weeks of stakeholder debate about when to set the filing deadline following her early March ruling reinstating the data collection, which the Obama administration adopted to root out gender- and race-based pay gaps. The form supplements the agency’s long-running collection of employers’ demographic data. Both components apply to all employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees.
The Trump administration rolled back the pay data component in 2017, citing its paperwork burden on employers, among other things. The National Women’s Law Center and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement challenged this rescission as unfair and poorly reasoned in November 2017 and won summary judgment last month, days before the EEOC started accepting employers’ demographic data for 2018.
The ruling apparently blindsided the EEOC, which said earlier this month it did not have the infrastructure to accept and secure employers’ pay data, but could set a Sept. 30 deadline if it hired a contractor.
Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, likewise claimed to have been taken unaware by the collection’s reinstatement, saying member employers have not kept data in a form transmissible to the EEOC and would need at least 18 months to complete the survey.
Judge Chutkan chided the EEOC for its lack of preparation at a hearing last week on when to set the deadline, saying she did not understand why the agency had not restored a page on its website telling employers how to submit their pay data. She said Thursday it was clear the EEOC never crafted a contingency plan in the event that the plaintiffs won and that the administration’s actions before and since her March order “indicate that the government is not committed to a prompt collection of Component 2 information.”
