The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (“EEOC”) proposed new EEO-1 Form is on hold indefinitely pending further review by the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”).

The proposed EEO-1 Form, created during the Obama Administration, seeks to combat pay inequality by including more categories for compensation and total hours worked in addition to the already-collected demographic data.  However, the OMB believes the collection of this additional proposed data conflicts with standards of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which was designed to reduce the amount of paperwork burden the federal government places upon both private businesses and citizens.

The OMB concluded that the circumstances for collecting this data had changed since the newly proposed EEO-1 Form’s inception and initial approval.  Additionally, the OMB concluded that the data collection is unduly burdensome, lacks practical usefulness and inadequately manages privacy and confidentiality issues.

Due to the indefinite hold, the EEOC published its Notice in the Federal Register on September 15, 2017, announcing the stay of the proposed EEO-1 form and informing affected businesses that they may use the previous version of the EEO-1 Form for their 2017 reports, which are due March 31, 2018.

What this means: employers with 100 or more employees have until March 31, 2018 to submit their 2017 data on race, ethnicity and gender using the previous version of the EEO-1 Form.