Legislative lowdown: EEO-1 deadline announced, California updates pay reporting requirements

Spring is a busy season for HR pros overseeing compensation and compliance, as both the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and a handful of states require employers to submit reports about their workforces around this time.

EEOC sets a deadline for EEO-1 reports. The EEOC recently said it will begin collecting data for Component 1 of EEO-1 reports on April 30. Employers will have until June 4 to submit demographic data on their employees for 2023.

Private employers with 100 or more workers, as well as federal contractors with 50 or more employees, are required to submit EEO-1 Component 1 reports on an annual basis. These confidential reports detail the number of workers businesses employ, broken down by job category, race, and ethnicity.

The EEOC uses this data “to investigate charges of employment discrimination against employers in private industry and to publish periodic reports on workforce demographics.”

Deadlines to submit EEO-1 reports have varied greatly in recent years. Last year, data collection for 2022 workforce demographics didn’t open until October, and employers had until December to submit their forms. Filing instructions for 2023 are available on the EEOC’s website. Companies will not be expected to submit data detailing employee compensation, as was the case in 2017 and 2018.

California updates pay reporting requirements. While the federal government doesn’t currently require employers to submit pay data, some states do. One such state is California, which since 2020 has required employers with 100 or more employees—those hired either directly or through labor contractors—to submit data detailing what their workers earn, along with demographic information including race, sex, and ethnicity.

California employers will have until May 8 to submit information for the 2023 reporting year to the state’s Civil Rights Department (CRD), the agency announced on Feb. 1. Employers are expected to submit data from a “snapshot period,” meaning a single pay period that occurred between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, 2023.

While most guidance from the previous year holds, there are a few changes employers should be aware of:

• Reporting on remote workers. Starting this year, California employers must report the number of employees in an employee group who worked remotely during their snapshot period. This means they were “entirely remote, teleworking, or home-based,” with no expectation they would report to a “physical establishment” for work, according to the CRD. This rule doesn’t apply to workers who were hybrid, and “expected to regularly appear in person to perform work at a particular establishment.”
• No skirting demographic data. When reporting on labor contractor employees, employers can’t report the race/ethnicity, or sex categories as “unknown.” Last year, which was the first time California asked for data on contractor employees, assigning them to an “unknown” category was permitted.

Companies that hire employees through labor contractors should pay careful attention to California’s pay reporting requirements, according to attorneys with the law firm Fisher Phillips. Even if only one contract employee that they employed out of 100 was based in California, this business would still be required to submit reporting data to the state.