The EEO-1 portal is open! What your team needs to do to comply with Component 2

It’s been a long time coming, but the time has come for your company to begin reporting more detailed employee pay data to the feds.

In preparation for Component 2 of the EEO-1 Report, the EEOC’s online portal became ready to accept employee pay data on July 15, 2019.

You’ll recall that back in the spring, the feds carved your reporting into two parts:

• Component 1 – the number of employees who work for you by job category, race, sex and ethnicity – will be due May 31, while
• Component 2 – hours worked and pay data from employee W-2s broken down by race, ethnicity and sex – will be due Sept. 30.

With Component 1 over and done, your team can focus on the more elaborate requirements.

Here’s what you need to do to hit the next deadline.

The nuts and bolts

The Sept. 30, 2019 deadline will be here before you know it, so Payroll will need to work with HR to get this info ready ASAP.

By now, you should’ve received a letter via mail as well as an email with a user ID that allows your company to log in to the portal.

Your first step: Choose a pay period between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31 as a “workforce snapshot” to report data for both 2017 and 2018. It must include all full-time and part-time workers who were employed during each selected pay period in the report.

Employees need to be counted by sex, race and ethnicity in one of 10 job categories. Then, your company must assign workers in each category to one of 12 pay bands based on their annual wages.

When categorizing employees’ wages, have Payroll use Box 1 earnings from workers’ Forms W-2 for 2017 and 2018.

To preemptively answer one question your team will likely have: Yes, even if employees didn’t work for your company for the full year, their annual wages must be reported if they were employed during the selected pay period.

Hours that employees worked also need to be included in the report.

Time must be reported collectively for each pay band and job category on a yearly basis, again broken down by race, ethnicity and sex.

What you can do now, what must wait

Right now, you can manually input data into the portal. Your team can also find Upload File Layout Specifications and accompanying Excel Files for 2017 and 2018 in the More Info and Additional References section.

But you’ll have to wait until mid-August to upload your file. That part isn’t open just yet.

If you haven’t already, start looking at your records to see which pay period may be the best for reporting this data, and double-check with HR to make sure they have the info needed on their end.