Citing the pandemic, the EEOC has announced that employers will not be required to file their 2019 EEO-1 reports until March, 2021. In other words, there will be no EEO-1 filing this year.
However, the EEOC is not skipping the 2019 reporting cycle—they are significantly delaying it.
Where are we today?
EEO-1 filing deadlines have become confusing enough. The now defunct “Component 2” reporting of compensation data came with a shift in longstanding reporting dates and timeframes. Until just a few years ago, employers filed EEO-1 reports by the end of September each year based on a “snapshot” taken the same year. With the advent of “Component 2,” the reporting scheme changed and employers had to adjust to filing reports by the end of March based on a snapshot taken the prior year.
For example, the “2018” EEO-1 reports, based on a snapshot taken in the last quarter of 2018, were actually filed in March 2019.
Then “Component 2” was shelved, but the reporting deadlines did not revert to the “old” scheme, so employers prepared to file the “old” EEO-1 reports on the “new” March 31 deadline. And then the pandemic hit.
Now the “2019” EEO-1 reports will be filed along with the “2020” EEO-1 reports in March, 2021. Confused yet? Don’t be, because it gets a little worse.
Moving Forward
Employers need to decide whether to prepare their 2019 EEO-1 data for reporting now and get it over with, or wait. If your HR database is capable of delivering in 2021 an accurate snapshot of the employment landscape in 2019, the EEO-1 project may not be a priority. But if there is any question about the potential reliability of that data, employers should consider at least pulling the data now (if they haven’t already). Note that any reconciliation of that data might also be harder to do a year from now, so just pulling and then shelving that data might not be enough. Employers should also consider how burdensome the project might be in 2021 if they are trying to prepare two years’ worth of reports at once.
Employers who contract-out their EEO-1 reporting obligations should consult with their vendors and decide on a path forward. At this point, your vendors have likely done most if not all of the work to prepare your 2019 EEO-1 filing, but may not bill for those services until the reports are actually filed. Budget practices may require a modification of existing agreements to invoice you this year for the 2019 EEO-1 project or a portion thereof. Otherwise, additional monies may need to be allocated to next year’s budget for essentially two EEO-1 filing projects.
Confusing? Yes, but not insurmountably so. To sum up, no one will file EEO-1 reports in calendar year 2020, but we will need to pull our 2020 EEO-1 snapshots at the end of this year. And in March of next year, barring further disruption, we will all be filing our 2019 and 2020 reports. How you get from here to there is largely up to you.
