Government, Worker Groups Agree Pay Reporting Appeal Is Moot

The government’s fight against reviving an Obama-era gender and race pay reporting requirement is moot because that data already has been collected from businesses, federal agencies and equal pay groups told a federal appeals court.

Justice Department attorneys said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit no longer needs to decide whether a federal judge overreached with her mandates on how the information should be collected because that judge deemed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s first-ever uniform collection of pay data complete on Feb. 10.

The motion could begin to resolve one chapter in a years-long dispute among businesses, equal pay advocates, and federal agencies over effective ways to shrink pay gaps for women and minorities, while balancing the burden placed on businesses.

“The parties agree that, in light of the district court’s order holding that the government has fully satisfied its obligations as mandated by the court’s orders, the case is now moot,” the government wrote in the motion filed Monday. “The parties propose a schedule for further motions to address whether the district court’s opinion and orders should be vacated as a result.”

The government believes that “the mooting of this case on appeal means that the district court’s opinion and orders should be vacated,” but the equal pay advocates disagree.

The White House’s Office of Management and Budget and the EEOC appealed Judge Tanya S. Chutkan’s March 2019 ruling to reinstate the collection. They argued that she went beyond merely overturning the Trump administration’s decision to stop the requirement from taking effect, and that the equal pay advocates who sued in 2017 to revive the collection lacked the legal standing to do so.

Chutkan approved closing the court-mandated collection after more than 87% of all required employers submitted fiscal year 2017 and 2018 pay data, broken down by race, sex, and ethnicity. The collection had been open since July 2019.

The EEOC and the White House’s OMB halted the pay data collection in 2017, prompting the National Women’s Law Center and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement to sue in November that year.

The agency announced in September it doesn’t plan to continue pay data collection under the Obama requirement. Current EEOC Chair Janet Dhillon hasn’t said whether pay data would be collected in another format.

The case is Nat’l Women’s Law Ctr. v. OMB, D.C. Cir., No. 19-5130, motion to govern further proceedings filed 4/13/20.