On September 29, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced that starting March 2018, it will collect summary employee wage and hours-worked data from some employers. Employers are required to continue use of the existing form until March 2018, when 2017 data will be reported. Visit the EEOC’s website for a sample of the new form.
Employers – including federal contractors and subcontractors – with 100 or more employees will report summary pay data using the new form. Federal contractors and subcontractors with 50-99 employees will not report summary pay data, but they will continue to report employees by job category as well as by sex, ethnicity, and race as they do now. Employers with 99 or fewer employees and Federal contractors and subcontractors with 49 or fewer employees will not be required to complete the EEO-1 report as is current practice. Federal contractor and subcontractor data will be shared with the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
Earlier in the year, AGC submitted comments to both the EEOC and the Office of Management and Budget opposing implementation of the new form. In both letters, AGC explained that the collection of wage and hours-worked data is not necessary because better suited tools already exist to assist with compensation benchmarking. Additionally, national wage data is useless for benchmarking purposes in construction and government analysis will not account for a wide variety of factors used to determine compensation.
While AGC’s comments stressed that this data collection is not needed, in an effort to mitigate the burdensome impact the proposed changes would have on its members should the report become final, AGC urged the EEOC to consider the use of W-2 data – specifically Box 5 data – to make reporting easier for employers and to change the reporting date to a post-annual reporting date that would accommodate the use of such data. The EEOC accepted both requests, with the exception of using Box 1 W-2 Data instead of Box 5.
A Fact Sheet for Small Businesses and a question and answer document can be found on the EEOC’s website. For additional information and resources, visit AGC’s Labor & HR Topical Resources website. The primary category is “EEO.”