Louise Davies is an Affirmative Action Paralegal in Constangy's Winston-Salem, North Carolina, office. For more than 15 years, she has helped employers develop affirmative action plans and respond to audits and on-site investigations by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. She also conducts diversity training for employers. Louise is a graduate of Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia.

It’s that time of the year!

No, back-to-school is still a few weeks away. It’s time for employers to start filing their EEO-1 and VETS-4212 reports.

The filing period for the EEO-1 and VETS-4212 Reports is now open.  Covered employers have until September 30 to submit responses to both surveys.

EEO-1 Report

If you are a federal contractor with 50 or more employees and meet the any of the following criteria, you are required to file an EEO-1 Report:

• You are a prime contractor or first-tier subcontractor, with a  contract, subcontract, or purchase order amounting to $50,000;
• You serve as a depository of Government funds in any amount; or
• You are a financial institution that is an issuing and paying agent for U.S. Savings Bonds and Notes.

Also, if you're a private employer subject to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and have 100 or more employees, you are required to file an EEO-1 Report, whether you're a federal contractor or not.

To complete the EEO-1 Report, employers must use employment figures from any pay period in July, August, or September.  This year's EEO-1 Report requires only information about race, ethnicity, and gender of your existing employees in each EEO-1 category for the pay period that you use.

Please note that your company’s password from 2015 for filing the report electronically will not work this year.  If your company has previously filed an EEO-1 Report electronically, you should receive a notification letter from the Joint Reporting Committee by August 15, 2016 with your new company password.

The EEOC’s frequently asked questions about the EEO-1 Report can be found here.

Enjoy that 2016 EEO-1 reporting while you can. If the proposed rule recently issued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission goes into effect, there will be no EEO-1 reports filed during calendar year 2017. The survey period will change from the current July-September to October-December. Employers will have until March 31, 2018, to file their EEO-1 reports, reflecting the data they collected during the October-December 2017 period.

That's the good news - the bad news is that the EEOC's proposed rule would require employers to annually report compensation in 12 pay bands and hours worked, for each EEO-1 category, broken down by race, ethnicity, and gender. (The proposed new due date of March 31 is intended to coincide with another happy annual event - income tax time.)

VETS-4212 Report

Generally, companies with a federal contract or subcontract in the amount of $150,000 or more are required to report annually on their affirmative action efforts in employing protected veterans. The VETS-4212 Report requests the number of protected veterans currently employed, classified by EEO-1 category. In contrast to the EEO-1 Report, it also collects data on the total number of new hires, both protected veterans and non-veterans, and the number of new hires who are protected veterans.

As with the EEO-1 Report, a user name and password is required to file the survey electronically. If you have previously filed the VETS-4212 electronically, your company information remains the same; however, if you are filing for the first time, you must register your company here.

Additional information on the VETS-4212 Report can be found here.

Image Credits: From flickr, Creative Commons license. Cuckoo clocks by Paul Downey; sundial by M.A. Lurig.