On October 8, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a motion with the court asking permission to consider the collection of compensation data for Component 2 of the EEO-1 Report complete. It is now up to Judge Tanya Chutkan to determine if EEOC has met its obligation to collect this data as mandated by the court on April 25, 2019. Judge Chutkan will now consider whether the EEOC’s goal response rate of 72.7%, which EEOC says it has exceeded, is acceptable or if the Commission should have set a higher goal.

If Judge Chutkan determines that EEOC’s goal response rate of 72.7% is acceptable, the agency will close the Component 2 data collection portal on November 11, 2019. However, if the judge determines the EEOC must meet a response rate higher than 72.7%, the portal will remain open until that response rate is reached or November 11, whichever is later.

Response Rate Goal Not Set in Stone

In its ruling on April 25, the court ordered EEOC to collect data for Component 2 until the response rate “…equals or exceeds the mean percentage of EEO-1 reporters that actually submitted EEO-1 reports in each of the past four reporting years.” In other words, the Commission was to use the average of the response rates from covered employers from the past four EEO-1 Report collections as its goal response rate for the collection of Component 2 data.

In practice, this requirement is not so simple. In the four previous collections, the unadjusted average response rate for the EEO-1 report was over 90%, which some civil rights groups have argued should be used to determine the goal response rate for Component 2. However, Samuel Haffer, the agency’s Chief Data Officer, indicated that this unadjusted rate was the result of the portals for traditional EEO-1 Reports being open for many months.

In 2017, EEOC ended the practice of leaving the traditional EEO-1 Report data collection portal open for an undetermined amount of time due to concerns about the quality of data collected. Instead, EEOC elected to leave the portal open for six weeks past the deadline for all years moving forward. The Commission decided it would be appropriate to use this same timeline for the collection of Component 2 data.

Because of this, EEOC believes that its target response rate for Component 2 should be parallel to the response rates of the traditional EEO-1 Report at six weeks past each respective deadline. In doing so, the Commission calculated that the average response rate was 72.7%.

As of October 8, 75.9% of eligible filers had submitted complete Component 2 data.