One Onerous New Regulation Down, Zillions More to Go
A while back I wrote about the Obama Administration's near exponential expansion of EEO reporting
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.
Fortunately, the Trump Administration has at least temporarily suspended this requirement:
On Tuesday, the White House suspended a burdensome reporting requirement for employers that would have cost them $400 million while yielding information of questionable value. It did so in rejecting changes to the EEO-1 form made at the end of the Obama administration.
The White House Office of Management and Budget stated that the pay collection and reporting requirements “lack practical utility, are unnecessarily burdensome, and do not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues.” It explained its reasoning in a letter to the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Victoria Lipnic.
The Obama administration had claimed that rewriting the form to include 3,660 boxes for companies to check or fill out would help identify wage discrimination. But very little of the information it sought would have shed any light on potential wage discrimination.
