To the relief of employers steeling themselves for compliance with the revised EEO-1 Report, the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has suspended indefinitely the new report's compliance date.  The revised report would have required private-sector employers with 100 or more employees and covered federal contractors to provide information on employee compensation and hours worked in addition to demographic information.  The new requirements would have applied to EEO-1 Reports for 2017, which would have been due by March 31, 2018.

In a statement issued on August 29, 2017, the Acting Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Victoria Lipnic, announced she had received a memo from the OIRA Administrator, Neomi Rao, informing her that OIRA was initiating a review and immediate stay of the effectiveness of the pay data collection aspects of the EEO-1 form that was revised on September 29, 2016, in accordance with its authority under the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA).

OIRA's decision is likely in response to the myriad complaints from the business community. Common criticisms of the new report include the substantial cost of compliance, lack of privacy safeguards, and its questionable utility in promoting pay equity. The revised report called for a broad range of data, which when analyzed, was unlikely to adequately explain pay differentials.

The EEOC is expected to provide more information about the revised EEO-1's status and what employers can now expect. In the meantime, employers should assume that they will be required to file EEO-1 Reports by March 31, 2018, based on a workforce snapshot taken between October and December 2017.  The information to be reported will include demographic information by EEO-1 job category, but it will not include information on compensation or hours worked.  Federal government contractors that are required to file VETS-4212 forms must still file those reports by September 30, 2017.