Washington, DC - The U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to return to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC or Commission) its proposal to collect employee compensation and hours-worked data from employers.

In comments filed yesterday, the Chamber argued that the EEOC’s proposal will impose costly administrative burdens on employers and yield data that will not provide any insight as to whether an employer’s pay practices are discriminatory. 

“EEOC is proposing to collect extensive data heretofore never collected by the federal government – without any developed framework to review the data or use it for any legally authorized or recognized purpose – with the irrational hope that it will support the Commission’s mission,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of Labor, Immigration and Employee Benefits for the U.S. Chamber. “Moreover, despite claims by EEOC that it will be held confidentially, there is real danger that the data will be mined by hackers and others to portray employer compensation practices in a false light. EEOC’s proposal will create a great burden on responders, yield useless data, and fail to advance the enforcement of federal employment policies.”

The Chamber and its members have long been supportive of nondiscrimination laws including the Equal Pay Act (EPA), Title VII, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and are concerned with EEOC’s current attempt to extract sensitive and confidential data from employers in a process that violates the Paperwork Reduction Act.