Today, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and Rep. James Comer (R-KY), Republican Leaders of the Committee on Education and Labor, sent a comment letter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) supporting the agency’s move to stop requiring businesses to collect and report employee pay data. Specifically, the letter argues the EEOC’s pay data collection is of no use in combatting pay discrimination, is overly burdensome, and creates unacceptable risks to the privacy and confidentiality of the employee data.
In the letter, Reps. Foxx and Comer write: “The [Paperwork Reduction Act] PRA includes commonsense standards to ensure data-collection mandates on the public will be useful for appropriate government functions, will not overly burden the public, and will not unduly risk exposure of private and confidential information. The EEO-1 pay data collection fails to meet any of the PRA’s standards, and we urge EEOC to discontinue this collection as the September 12 Notice proposes.”
Background: Under the Obama administration, the EEOC significantly expanded the information required to be included in the Employer Information Report—the EEO-1—by requiring businesses to collect and report employee pay data. Before the Obama scheme was proposed, pay data was never part of the EEO-1 report. Job creators around the country weighed in and voiced their concerns with this extreme regulatory mandate. In 2017, the Trump administration argued this mandate was 'unnecessarily burdensome' and 'lacked practical utility.’ The EEOC recently estimated that the burden of collecting and reporting EEO-1 information with pay data for 2018 would be $622 million, a significant increase from EEOC’s 2016 estimate of $53.5 million annually.
