NYC holds hearing on law regulating automated employment decision tools

On November 4, 2022, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) held a hearing on the proposed regulations for the city’s new law regulating use of automated employment decision tools (AEDTs). The AEDT law, commonly referred to as Local Law 144, will broadly regulate the use of AI and other computational processes used in employment selection and is set to take effect January 1, 2023. Aspects of the proposed regulations will be familiar to employers because the regulations explicitly borrow concepts from the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (UGESP).

Stakeholders hoped that when the proposed regulations were released in September 2022, they would answer some of the open questions created by Local Law 144, including outlining the procedure for conducting required bias audits of AEDTs. The proposed regulations do provide clarity in some areas but in other places they create additional confusion and have drawn a substantial amount of criticism. As evidence of this, the hearing was originally scheduled for October 24 but had to be rescheduled to November 4, when the number of attendees at the October 24 virtual hearing exceeded the number allowed by NYC’s Zoom account.