NAS issues report on EEOC pay report

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report addressing the collection of employers’ compensation data by the federal government using the EEO-1 Report was finally released on July 28, 2022. The report recommends that compensation data be collected again, but not by repeating the prior data collection processes.

Background

President Barack Obama’s National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force in 2010 directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to convene experts to review methods for measuring and collecting pay information from employers. An expert panel was selected by the NAS, which issued a report recommending the commission first determine the purpose for which it was collecting pay data and then to do a pilot study.

In 2016, President Barack Obama announced the EEOC would collect pay data, and after notice and comment, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) approved the commission’s proposal to collect W-2, Box 1, pay data in 12 pay bands by EEO-1 job categories and hours worked.

In August 2017, the OMB suspended the pay data collection. In March 2019, however, a federal district court reinstated Component 2 and ordered the agency to collect the 2017 and 2018 pay data by September 2019. The agency collected the data but voted not to extend the collection.

In 2020, the EEOC asked the NAS to review the pay data collected and provide recommendations for future pay data collections.

NAS recommendations

Buried in the report is the panel’s essential finding: