by Fred Satterwhite, Senior Consultant, DCI Consulting Group
OFCCP submitted its Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) for "Non Discrimination In Compensation: Compensation Data Collection Tool" to the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on February 18, 2011. This is the first step in the official process to implement a new contractor survey tool similar to the Equal Opportunity (EO) Survey that was rescinded in 2006.
In the Fall 2010 Unified Agenda and Regulatory Plan, OFCCP stated: "OFCCP is considering the development of a new strategic compensation data collection tool that will effectively identify contractors that are likely to violate E.O. 11246. In addition, the data collection tool may be used to conduct establishment-specific, contractor-wide, and industry-wide analyses. Through publication of an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM), OFCCP will seek input from stakeholders on issues relating to the scope, content, and format of the tool to ensure that it is an effective and efficient data collection instrument."
OFCCP plans to develop and implement a web-based compensation data collection tool that would enable the agency to identify indicators of pay disparity among federal contractors. As stated above, the agency is issuing an ANPRM to solicit information on how to collect and use such data. The tool would collect compensation data from 70,000 to 110,000 contractors (depending on threshold set for completing the survey). These data would be likely arrayed by job group. The scope of the data has yet to be fully determined. Current possibilities include salary, gender, race and ethnicity data for each employee or average compensation and variances for each group by gender, race and ethnic category. Also not yet determined is the type of personnel activity data that will be required (terminations, promotions, etc. by group and demographic category) and whether data on veteran status and disability will be included in the application.
Obviously, this description covers a much wider scope than just contractors' compensation data.
OIRA is also still reviewing OFCCP's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that would revise the regulations implementing the nondiscrimination and affirmative action provisions for veterans, including requirements to conduct substantive analyses of recruitment and placement activities and to use numerical goals to measure the effectiveness of the affirmative action program for veterans. OFCCP submitted this NPRM to OIRA on July 2, 2010, and it was originally targeted for publication in December, 2010 before subsequently being rescheduled for January, 2011.
