OFCCP Compliance Archives » Biddle Consulting Group News

Are You Devoting Adequate Resources to EEO Compliance?

September 28, 2020 By Matt Nusbaum

Organizations often view equal employment opportunity (EEO) and affirmative action (AA) compliance as “check the box” exercises that require minimal effort and follow-through. Too many businesses falsely believe that as long as they post their policies in the right places and run the right reports and analyses, they can rest assured that they are “compliant” with all applicable laws and regulations.

While minimum technical compliance is still important, it will only get your organization to the starting line; these measures might allow you to run the race, but they will hardly determine the outcome. Even companies that are completely in technical compliance with their affirmative action plans can still find themselves facing a six- or seven-figure discrimination settlement.

Why is this? When it comes to EEO and affirmative action compliance, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) within the Department of Labor ultimately judges your company on its level of compliance. In other words, the OFCCP wants to know what you do with all those reports after they are run.

Navigating Compliance Challenges

Most often, EEO/AA tasks are delegated to human resources or legal departments. These teams tend to be strapped for time and resources because they’re already juggling several essential projects and responsibilities. In most scenarios, being on the “compliance team” does not mean compliance is your only responsibility. It simply means the rest of your department will not be burdened by it or involved in it.

Making matters worse, HR and legal professionals spend an outsize portion of their time putting out fires. Scheduled compliance projects — such as preparing annual affirmative action plans — are often interrupted by more immediate, pressing concerns.

The consequences of poor compliance are serious, though. In the short term, the primary risk is that the Department of Labor will investigate a complaint or initiate a compliance audit that your organization is unprepared to accommodate. If you’ve only been “checking the boxes” and treating affirmative action like a paperwork exercise, the investigators will take an in-depth, detailed look at your practices — and no one knows what they might find.

Over the long term, repeated compliance problems can debilitate your company’s ability to grow and thrive. Employees who feel continuously mistreated will become disengaged and eventually quit their jobs — and so will some of their colleagues. This creates the risk that word will spread about your toxic work environment, making it difficult to attract and retain the talent you need to compete.

In the internet age, once a company is identified as a bad place to work for women or people of color, that stigma can cause significant damage unless tangible changes are made.

How BCGi Can Help

BCGi is a membership organization that offers information, training, and tools to help companies strengthen their commitments to EEO and affirmative action compliance.

We are working hard to make compliance training more effective and affordable for hiring managers and recruiters — and for compliance professionals themselves. We are focused on helping our members do more with the resources they have, understanding that it can be hard to come by new money for big initiatives.

When a compliance team is given ample time and resources, the possibilities are limitless. These professionals can develop stronger internal messaging campaigns and better monitor the effectiveness of their hiring processes, promotion practices, termination policy enforcement, and other myriad processes that typically don’t receive enough attention. They could also dive more deeply into the assignment of Census job codes and the creation of affirmative action plans while providing more regular and robust training. There is always something a compliance team could be doing.

The stronger your foundation, the higher and better you can build. BCGi offers several levels of membership that accommodate the needs of every organization. We invite you to learn more here and join us today.

OFCCP Publishes Revised EEO Tagline Requirement, Loosens Posting Requirements

August 30, 2019 By Kali Roberts

The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has released a new compliance assistance guide that makes subtle but important changes to the language federal contractor employers are required to use in advertisements for prospective employees informing them of the organization’s status as an equal opportunity employer. Informally known as the “EO tagline,” contractors will now officially be allowed to simply use “EOE” as a substitute for the phrase, “an equal opportunity employer.” The agency’s guidance also provides that the “EEO is the Law” poster and the required “pay transparency” notice may be posted either “electronically” or “physically,” deviating slightly from past guidance heavily favoring physical posters on company bulletin boards.

The OFCCP’s regulations implementing Executive Order (E.O.) 11246 explicitly provide contractors with essentially two options for a compliant EO tagline. Contractors can either expressly “state that all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin,” or substitute the abbreviated phrase, “an equal opportunity employer.” 41 C.F.R. § 60-1.41. Guidance released after the agency’s regulations implementing Section 503 and VEVRAA were revised in 2014 required contractors to, at a minimum, add the words “disability” and “vet” to their E.O. 11246 tagline to be compliant with those requirements.

The agency never officially sanctioned taglines such as “EEO/AA m/f/d/v.” Such hyper-abbreviated taglines did become popular during the George W. Bush administration, likely because the agency simply did not rigorously enforce that requirement. Under the Obama administration, however, the agency became much stricter regarding these types of “technical” requirements and began to stringently enforce based on the plain language in their regulations.

In the newly released compliance assistance guide titled, “Postings & Notice Requirements,” the OFCCP is for the first time officially and explicitly allowing contractors to substitute “EOE” for the phrase “an equal opportunity employer” in their taglines. Assuming a contractor is subject to the requirements of all three authorities—E.O. 11246, Section 503, and VEVRAA—the minimum compliant tagline is now, “EOE disability/vet.”

Biddle Consulting Group still strongly recommends that contractors spell out “veteran,” rather than use the allowed abbreviation, “vet,” as many veterans find the abbreviation off-putting or even offensive.

Contractors can still use the “long form” tagline listing out all of the protected characteristics, or the shortened phrase, “an equal opportunity employer.” The OFCCP’s new guidance also provides that if the E.O. 11246 tagline lists any specific characteristics protected under that authority they must list all such characteristics (race. Color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and national origin).

So, for example, if your tagline currently reads, “All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status,” it is not compliant because it leaves out “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

The OFCCP’s new guidance also states that the “EEO is the Law” poster and the required “pay transparency nondiscrimination provision” can be posted “either physically on the premises or electronically,” so long as all applicants and employees have “a way to access” the materials. Note that the compliance assistance guide specifically excludes policy statements and other notices that are part of a written affirmative action program (AAP). The OFCCP’s regulations implementing Section 503 and VEVRAA specifically require that an affirmative action policy to be posted “on company bulletin boards.”

If you have questions about your EO tagline, or any other OFCCP compliance-related inquiries, contact a Biddle consultant today.

OFCCP Compliance Assistance

August 31, 2017 By editor

As part of their compliance assistance efforts, the OFCCP published a jurisdictional threshold infographic to help with one of the most basic questions that contractors and subcontractors ask: “Should we develop written Affirmative Action Programs?”

OFCCP Compliance Assistance

One of the questions we get asked frequently from those doing business with the federal government is how to determine whether they are required to develop an affirmative action program (AAP). The short answer is that it depends on the size of the federal contract or subcontract and the size of the workforce. To make this jurisdiction question a little easier to answer, OFCCP created a jurisdictional threshold “cheat sheet.”

This printable infographic includes:

Specifications on basic (non-AAP) coverage for all of OFCCP’s laws,
Inflationary adjustments for two of OFCCP’s laws, and
Contract amount and employee counts for AAP coverage under all of OFCCP’s laws.

OFCCP Compliance Assistance

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