{"id":10984,"date":"2026-06-18T08:12:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T08:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/federal-court-overturns-ombs-stay-of-eeoc-pay-data-collection-rule-finding-it-was-arbitrary-and-capricious\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T08:12:05","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T08:12:05","slug":"federal-court-overturns-ombs-stay-of-eeoc-pay-data-collection-rule-finding-it-was-arbitrary-and-capricious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/federal-court-overturns-ombs-stay-of-eeoc-pay-data-collection-rule-finding-it-was-arbitrary-and-capricious\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Court Overturns OMB\u2019s Stay of EEOC Pay Data Collection Rule, Finding It Was \u201cArbitrary and Capricious\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n On March 4, the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated an August 29, 2017 decision by the Office of Management and Budget to stay the EEOC\u2019s requirement that employers use a revised EEO-1 form to report pay data information by employee job position and gender, race and ethnicity. Judge Chutkan held that OMB\u2019s decision was \u201carbitrary and capricious\u201d and, thus, violated the Administrative Procedures Act. Nat\u2019l Women\u2019s Law Ctr.\u00a0v. Office of Mgm\u2019t and Budget<\/em>, No.\u00a017-cv-2458 (Mar.\u00a04, 2019); see\u00a0also<\/em>\u00a082\u00a0Fed. Reg. 43362 (Stay the Effectiveness of the EEO-1 Pay Data Collection). The court held that the OMB\u2019s decision to stay the EEOC\u2019s data collection in the revised EEO-1 form did not meet the standards set out under OMB\u2019s own regulations governing an OMB decision to review and\/or stay a previously approved collection of information by a federal agency.<\/p>\n

The court\u2019s decision means that the revised EEO-1 form is technically now in effect. The ordinary deadline for filing an EEO-1 report is March 31 of any calendar year. The EEOC\u2019s website at the moment is outdated \u2013 it states that \u201cthe filing deadline for the 2017 EEO-1 survey has been extended to Friday, June 1, 2018.\u201d As of the posting of this blog, neither the EEOC nor OMB have issued any statements or direction concerning whether the deadline for this year\u2019s filing of 2018 data will be extended and\/or whether employers will be required to use the new form. There is also no word on whether the government will appeal the decision. We are monitoring this issue and will provide more information as it becomes available.<\/p>\n

Further complicating matters, however, is that the EEOC lacks a quorum. Only two of the five commissioners are seated: Victoria A. Lipnic, the Acting Chair, appointed by President Trump, and Charlotte A. Burrows, appointed by President Obama. A third Commissioner, Chai Feldblum, had been re-nominated by President Trump in December 2017, but her nomination never left committee and thus expired at the end of the 115th Congress. Under 42 U.S. Code \u00a7 2000e-4(c), at least three commissioners are required to constitute a quorum of the Commission. The EEOC also currently lacks a general counsel.<\/p>\n

As background, the EEO-1 form is a form gathering information on employee populations in certain broad bands of positions by race, gender and ethnicity, and is required of employers with 100 or more employees. In September 2016, the EEOC finalized a rule expanding the data to be reported by employers to include: (i) summary pay data based on W-2 wages, reporting the total number of full and part-time employees by race and gender in each of 12\u00a0pay bands listed for each EEO-1 job category (executive level, professionals, sales workers, etc.), for each of the employer\u2019s physical locations; and (ii) the number of hours worked by employees in each pay band.<\/p>\n

The pay data requirement was controversial. Many employer groups objected to the burden entailed in collecting and reporting the pay data, and also pointed out that the data required would be virtually meaningless as reported \u2013 as one example, because employees are sorted by 10\u00a0job categories, that may group together very disparate functions and employees with different educational and professional credentials.<\/p>\n

On August 29, 2017, the OMB announced the immediate stay of the rule, citing the Paperwork Reduction Act (\u201cPRA\u201d). The OMB\u2019s memorandum stated that it had determined that it was authorized under the PRA to review the previously approved EEOC collection of information because circumstances related to the collection had changed and the burden estimates provided by EEOC at the time of initial submission were materially in error. Specifically, OMB pointed to the fact that, since approving the revised EEO-1 form on September 29, 2016, the EEOC released data file specifications for employers to use in submitting EEO-1 data, but those specifications were not made available during the public comment process and, thus, the EEOC\u2019s burden estimates did not account for the use of these particular data file specifications, which may have changed the initial burden estimate. The OMB asked the EEOC to submit a new proposal for the information to be collected for the EEO-1 form.<\/p>\n

The stay prompted the lawsuit brought by the National Women\u2019s Law Center and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement against the EEOC and the OMB that resulted in this week\u2019s decision. Judge Chutkan held that the OMB\u2019s stay decision was arbitrary and capricious because: (1) its \u201cassertion that the data file specifications were not contained in the Federal Register, thereby depriving the public of an opportunity to comment on them, is misdirected, inaccurate, and ultimately unpersuasive\u201d; and (2)\u00a0its assertion that the EEOC\u2019s burden estimates did not account for the use of the particular data file specifications, which may have changed the initial burden estimate, \u201cwas unsupported by any analysis.\u201d\n <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On March 4, the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated an August 29, 2017 decision by the Office of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10985,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8157,8158,2614,143,292,1118,554,3012,8156,328,510,372,2691],"class_list":["post-10984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-arbitrary","tag-capricious","tag-collection","tag-court","tag-data","tag-eeoc","tag-federal","tag-finding","tag-ombs","tag-overturns","tag-pay","tag-rule","tag-stay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}