Most people are usually focused on Tax Day as a major federal filing deadline. They also often focus on overall filing of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s EEOC-1 Report requirement. Filing tax is more important for large employers and federal contractors. For the layman, the EEO-1 report is a compliance survey mandated by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) under its regulations implementing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Through this report, the EEOC collects data on the basis of race, ethnicity, and sex of private-sector employees, which is further subdivided by the job category. The EEOC uses this data to analyze job patterns for women and minorities in the private industry to provide insight that is helpful for enforcement efforts. It should be borne in mind that the information included in an employer’s EEO-1 report may be used in litigation against that employer.
Penalties for Non-Compliance
The EEOC is legally within its rights to seek a court order requiring non-compliant employers to file EEO-1 report. Failure to file an EEO-1 report for most employers does not entail any civil penalties or fees, but it should be kept in mind that litigation can be potentially expensive and it would be unwise not to comply. Federal contractors ought to be careful in this regard.
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) may cancel, terminate, or suspend all or a portion of any federal contract held by a non-compliant employer. Non-compliant federal contractors may also be subjected to permanent debarment or debarment for a specified period of time.
The penalties against employers who file willfully false EEO-1 reports are much more significant and are punishable by fines or imprisonment. Stringent penalties are in place to ensure that correct and valid data is filed through the EEO-1 report. EEO-1 usually itself presents as a cumbersome report for many employers to complete but keeping this in mind, the report is not as comprehensive as it was initially presumed to be. The 2017 EEO-1 reporting requirements were revised to include a second component (imaginatively called “Component 2”). Component 2 required employers to aggregate and report each employee’s income and working hours for the year ending December 31, 2017. The Office of Management and Budget, however, has officially stayed in the enforcement of these requirements while it reviews the Component 2 requirement for compliance with the federal Paperwork Reduction Act. Because of this stay, employers are not required to report pay and hour data on their upcoming EEO-1 reports. This in turn makes the EEO-1 report much less cumbersome to be completed and requires a lesser investment of time to be done correctly.
The regulations which have been rollbacked are expected to go into place for next year’s submission of EEO-1 forms. The best way to stay clear of future penalties is to have a good in-depth collection of employee data rather than being scrambling for the needed data at the last minute. This is the best way to get a head start for the EEO-1 report filing.
Take Away
EEO-1 report is a standard form which includes all the information about the employer. All employers with 15 or more employees should file EEO-1 report and are required to keep the data of employment under Commission regulations. For this, an employer must know the EEO-1 requirements and penalties of not filing this report. Hope this article will help you know the penalties for not filing EEO-1 report.
