New EEOC Payroll Reporting Rule Proposed -- I am Officially Exhausted With This Administration
I have written here before that all the free time I used to invest thinking about how to improve my business has been spent over the last 4-5 years solely on figuring out how to comply with new government regulations. We are still trying to figure out the ins and outs of required Obamacare reporting, we have no idea yet how we are going to comply with new rules turning all of our salaried managers into timeclock punchers, and now there is this:
On the anniversary of President Barack Obama signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced proposed changes to its EEO-1 report, requiring employers to submit employee W-2 earnings and hours worked. All employers with at least 100 employees would be required to comply. EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) would jointly have access to the pay data for enforcement purposes.
Available are advance copies of the proposed rule and the proposed pay reporting form.
While the Obama Administration’s January 29 statement announcing the proposal focused mainly on the gender “pay gap” as the basis for the new requirements, the proposed changes will mandate submission of pay data broken down by race/ethnicity, in addition to gender.
For the past few years, at the President’s direction, EEOC and OFCCP have sought to develop a reporting tool that would require employers to submit pay data on employees nationwide so the agencies can target investigations to address the gender “pay gap.” This proposal is the culmination of that effort.
The proposed rule will be published on February 1 and interested parties will have 60 days to submit comments.
Forget for a moment that the whole purpose of this rule is to provide litigation attorneys a database they can mine to legally harass businesses. The reporting requirements here are incredibly onerous. It takes the current EEO-1 (the annual exercise where we strive for a post-racial society by racially categorizing all of our employees) and makes it something like 15-20 times longer. In addition, rather than simply "count" an employee as being on staff in a certain race-gender category, we now have to report their income and hours worked. Either I will have to hire staff just to do this stupid report, or I will again (like with Obamacare) have to pay a third party thousands of dollars a year to satisfy yet another government reporting requirement. This is utter madness.
Get this -- the report has 3600 individual cells that must be filled in. And this is in addition to the current EEO-1 form, which also still has to be filled out. The draft rule assumes 6-7 hours per company per year for this reporting. They must be joking.
In the past, I have merely asked each local manager to tell me how many folks they have in each racial category. Now, I am going to have to put everyone's race and gender into the payroll system -- there is no other way to do this. And by the way, I just checked. I have a very capable payroll company and I don't see any way to report wages and hours by race.
Congratulations Obama Administration, but I believe you have made me a Republican voter in the next Presidential election. I have not voted for a Republican for President since George HW Bush, generally voting for whatever libertarian candidate is present. For a while, particularly when one compared GWB to Bill Clinton, Republicans just were not that much better on economic issues than Democrats and they were terrible on social issues and things like immigration. Now I am going to have to hold my nose on all that stuff and become a one-issue voter like my wife (she votes solely on abortion availability) and vote solely for people who have some prospect of not larding on more of this kind of crap. And while I don't know the R's very well, for sure Hillary and Bernie will just be more of the same.
Update: More here from the same source, who has the same observations about what a joke the administrative burden calculations are that I had.
buanadha:
welcome to the party.
February 9, 2016, 6:05 amMNHawk:
Remember the good ole days when the Big Arguments were over innocuous things like a 31% tax rate or 28%, or a V chip on TVs?
Good times those were.
February 9, 2016, 8:00 amReallyOldOne:
Do employees have to (by law) reveal their race? I NEVER answer that question, but I have not taken a new job for years.
February 9, 2016, 8:04 amBruceInVA:
Every chance I get I refuse to answer about race. You never gonna get past it if you keep bringing it up.
Will continue the rest of my working life working for just me.
Maybe you can get every employee to "identify" as something like, Pacific Islander. We can "identify" now. Kids with penises want to "identify" as girls. Whatsername Rachel wanted to "identify" as black. And what gender do you assign? Whatever they tell you? Or do you get to play TSA and grope and see what bits they have?
February 9, 2016, 9:01 amCraig Loehle:
More and more people are multi-racial. How do you classify them? "Hispanic" actually encompasses many races including white, many of whom do not consider themselves to be a minority. Just nuts. Hiring quotas next? But Supreme Court has pretty much struck down hiring quotas.
February 9, 2016, 9:50 amjoe:
A) Craig below has a good point - How do you classify multi-racial?
B) in my industry - the pool of qualified minorities (black and hispanic) is less than 5% vs 12-14% blacks in the general population an 15% of hispanics in the general population. FWIW - in my industry, a graduate with an accounting degree with less than a 3.2 gpa is rarely qualified. I doubt anyone at the EEOC has a concept of what an actual qualified candidate is.
C) The construction industry would be devastated since blacks comprise less than 10% of the workforce while hispanics comprise 80%+ of the workforce - at least in my section of the country.
My last comment - What is the statutory authority for obtaining this information?
February 9, 2016, 10:15 amCT_Yankee:
So if we do face that awkward moment in the polling station where a ballot requires voting for either Hillary or Trump, will they provide grief counselors for the truly traumatized?
February 9, 2016, 3:05 pmScott Grannis:
Thanks for the fascinating details you provide which document so well the onerous regulatory burdens faced by business today. Is it any wonder that this is the slowest recovery on record? Actually, it's amazing that the economy is growing at all with these massive headwinds. You'd have to be crazy to start a business these days, just like you'd have to be crazy to want to become a doctor.
February 9, 2016, 3:06 pmMatthew Teague:
3600 cells. The government says you can do that in 6 hours.
That would be 600 cells per hour.
10 cells per minute.
6 seconds per cell.
Is there any avenue where this can be halted during the comment period? Because this "estimate" is beyond stupid.
February 9, 2016, 3:42 pmFred_Z:
Gibbon, on the late Roman Empire:"The freedman … exposed, in true and lively colours, the vices of a declining empire of which he had so long been the victim; the cruel absurdity of the Roman princes, unable to protect their subjects against the public enemy, unwilling to trust them with arms for their own defence; the intolerable weight of taxes, rendered still more oppressive by the intricate or arbitrary modes of collection; the obscurity of numerous and contradictory laws; the tedious and expensive forms of judicial proceedings; the partial administration of justice; and the universal corruption which increased the influence of the rich and aggravated the misfortunes of the poor…"
via Derbyshire: "The Roman Empire, both east and west, was in fact in such an
advanced state of decay that some Romans preferred life among the
barbarians to the arbitrary justice, extortionate taxes and gross
inequality of late-Roman life. Those ambassadors from Constantinople
were accosted by a Hunnish noble who spoke to them in Greek. He was a
citizen of the eastern empire who had been captured and enslaved when
the Huns sacked one of the Balkan cities. After doing good service for
his masters, however, they had freed him, and he had risen to wealth and
power among them"
It's from an article by Derb in a certain magazine which gets no nod from me because they fired Derb for the heinous crime of telling the truth.
Anyway, "arbitrary justice, extortionate taxes and gross
February 9, 2016, 6:42 pminequality ..." sounds familiar.
Rick C:
Not that I'm endorsing this change or anything, but any capable payroll package will generate this report for you (of course it will take time for them to make the change.)
February 9, 2016, 8:42 pmKatyn:
I'm multiracial Dutch-Irish-Scot.
February 10, 2016, 5:44 amAnn_In_Illinois:
I work at a University that just sent out an email pleading with anyone belonging to certain groups (I think Native American was one) to officially self-identify. They're being judged based on how many members of those groups they have, but they're not allowed to require anyone to report, so all they can do is to ask nicely.
February 10, 2016, 1:55 pmJ K Brown:
You know, I find this apparent US/Europe collusion in many matters to be curious if not concerning. Not only does there seems to be collusion on Islamic immigration, gender pay gap, etc.
Back in July 2015, David Cameron announced he’d close the gender pay gap in the next decade. Proposing to take the first step by making larger firms publish their pay gap figures, I wrote up a response for the Spectator’s Coffee House, arguing that this was an ill-conceived idea:
February 13, 2016, 3:10 pmhttp://www.adamsmith.org/blog/liberty-justice/nicky-morgan-has-proposed-the-worst-possible-way-to-calculate-a-gender-pay-gap/
ladyhawk:
Just make it all up. Figure out what "they" think is equitable and jigger your figures to comply. Long ago it was noticed in the Soviet Union that when a law becomes a joke at the outset, it is widely disobeyed or ignored, and the rulers lose all semblance of respect. Sound familiar?
February 17, 2016, 9:51 amIgor:
Would you settle for a "safe space"?
May 10, 2016, 10:31 am