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Employers with 100 or more employees will have to report wage and hour data on EEO-1 forms by Sept. 30, following yesterday’s court ruling. Companies still have to report their employment data by race and gender on May 31 as was previously scheduled.

According to numerous published reports, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who ordered reinstatement of the wage and hour report last month, accepted the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s plan to collect the data for 2018 and ordered the agency to also establish a reporting system for one additional year of data, either 2017 or 2019.

Ryan Golden at HR Dive, says, “This is a key moment of clarity for employers looking to prepare their compliance efforts for EEO-1 reporting.”

Now that the Sept. 30 deadline is official, EEOC and employers could face other issues,” Golden writes. “Attorneys who’ve spoken with HR Dive previously were not aware of many employers, if any, who had begun the pay culling process. But they say the process is fairly straightforward, despite perhaps being time-intensive for those in charge of it.”

Read Golden’s summary here.

EEO-1 reports require businesses with 100 or more employees and certain federal contractors to report the job titles of their employees by race and gender. In 2016, the Obama administration expanded the reports to include salary and wage information in addition to job titles. President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) put a hold on that requirement, citing its authority to halt burdensome regulatory requirements, until a federal judge ruled that OMB did not justify its decision.

While the reporting requirements seemed especially burdensome in 2016, they may be something businesses should be doing now anyway. The #MeToo movement and New Jersey’s one-year-old pay equity law do not legally require businesses to collect pay data, but according to at least one New Jersey attorney, they should be analyzing their pay practices to protect against legal liabilities.

“If employers have a gender-equity pay gap, the Diane B. Allen Act (New Jersey’s pay equity law) makes it significantly harder to defend that discrepancy,” says attorney M. Trevor Lyons of Walsh, Pizzi, O’Reilly and Falanga.

“My advice to employers would be to use the new requirement of the EEO-1 report as an opportunity to analyze your wages for potential pay-equity issues,” Lyons said.