Tips for Properly Filing an EEO-1 Report

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) recently released an updated instructional booklet to help employers properly fill out their 2022 demographic data on the EEO-1 form.

"We've worked to modernize the collections and improve the quality of data collected," Kimberly Essary, deputy chief data officer for the EEOC, said during a SHRM webcast on Oct. 4. The agency is "not requesting any new type of demographic data. It's the same categories that have been requested in past collections."

Private employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees must submit annual EEO-1 reports through the EEOC's online filing system. State and local governments and public school systems are exempt.

Companies can start submitting their demographic data on the EEO-1 form on Oct. 31, and submissions are due by Dec. 5. After Dec. 5, the EEOC will send a "failure to file" notice, instructing employers to submit their data no later than Jan. 9, 2024, if they haven't done so already. After Jan. 9, no more reports will be accepted, and employers will be considered noncompliant if they haven't submitted their data already, Essary said.

Employers should pick a pay period between Oct. 1, 2022, and Dec. 31, 2022, to use to provide a snapshot of their employee demographics. They don't have to pick the same week that they used in the previous year's report, said Paul Guerino, director of the data development and information products division in the EEOC's Office of Enterprise Data and Analytics, but they cannot correct their data after they submit it to the EEOC.

The purpose of collecting the demographic data is to support the agency's enforcement actions, facilitate research on employment patterns, and encourage self-assessment by employers, according to the EEOC. The EEO-1 form does not include pay data.

If an employer fails to submit the EEO-1 form for one year, it cannot submit one the following year, Guerino said.

The EEOC can get a court order to compel an employer to file an EEO-1 report. Federal contractors and subcontractors could lose their contract if they don't submit the report.

Change for Multi-Establishment Employers

A multi-establishment employer is an organization with more than one establishment where business is conducted or where services or industrial operations are performed.

Beginning with the 2022 data, multi-establishment employers will no longer be required to file a separate type of establishment report based on the size of each nonheadquarters establishment. Instead, there is a newly named establishment-level report used to submit demographic data for each of the nonheadquarters establishments, regardless of size.

Multi-establishment employers will still be required to submit a headquarters report and a consolidated report. The headquarters report should include all employees working at the headquarters and remote employees who report to the headquarters. The consolidated report for multi-establishment employers will be auto-populated and auto-generated with data from their headquarters report and each establishment-level report, Guerino said.

Racial Demographics

On the EEO-1 form, the demographic data is broken down by race and sex under these job categories: senior-level executives, midlevel managers, professionals, technicians, sales workers, administrative support workers, craft workers, operatives, laborers and service workers. Companies give the EEOC the data in aggregate, so individuals aren't identified.

Completing the EEO-1 report isn't as simple as it may sound, especially when it comes to racial classifications that aren't always obvious. Currently, the categories for race on the EEO-1 form are white; Black or African American; Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander; Asian; American Indian or Alaska Native; or two or more races. People of Middle Eastern or North African descent would be listed as white. Hispanic or Latino is categorized as an ethnicity, not a race, on the form.

The federal Office of Budget and Management (OMB) is expected to release new standards on reporting race and ethnicity by summer 2024, Essary said. One of the OMB's initial proposals is to provide a separate category for people of Middle Eastern or North African descent.

Nonbinary Employees

The EEO-1 form does not have a box to designate the gender of employees who are nonbinary. Instead, employers can voluntarily use the comments section to note the number of nonbinary employees.

When reporting nonbinary employees in the comments section of the reports, employers should preface the data with the phrase "Additional Nonbinary Employee Data."

If an employer includes the number of nonbinary employees in the comments, it should not include those employees in the male or female categories within the reports, Essary said.