Collecting Compensation Data from Employers (2012) / Chapter Skim
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2 Alternative Sources of Wage Data
2 Alternative Sources of Wage Data
Pages 26-45
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From page 26... ...
We also discuss other possible sources of wage information and the experiences of other agencies in collecting such information.1 We first consider the capacity of existing federal administrative data series that include earnings information from employers to meet a requirement for wage information by gender, race, and national origin. If these administrative data, mostly from tax collections, could suffice to provide the necessary wage data for use in antidiscrimination enforcement, a new data collection process could be avoided.
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From page 27... ...
We also discuss the data collection programs of the states of New Mexico and Minnesota and the Canadian province of Ontario. These jurisdictions now gather earnings information from employers for pay equity purposes.
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From page 28... ...
. The three administrative data systems are used primarily to collect taxes and determine benefits for the purposes of administering and funding the federal income tax system (by the IRS)
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"The IRS decision is obtained by the filing of a Form SS-8 for a firm or worker seeking to have IRS establish officially the employee or independent contractor status of a particular worker. This transaction then has ramifications for the other employee data collection systems that are mandated by such legislation as the State Unemployment Tax Act (SUTA)
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30 TABLE 2-1 Available Items in Administrative Records Relevant to EEO Earnings at Identity of Employee Employee Employee Source Employee Level Employer Gender Race/Ethnicity Nativity State Unemployment Insurance YES YES NO NO NO State Employment Security Agency NO YES NO NO NO Internal Revenue Service YES YES NO NO YESa Social Security Administration YES YES YES YES YES aOnly from individual taxpayer identification number (ITIN) applications.
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From page 31... ...
State employment security agencies also collect aggregate monthly employment (for the pay period containing the 12th of the month) for each quarter and aggregate quarterly employee compensation from each employer in the state covered by state UI laws and for federal workers covered by the Unemployment Compensation for Federal Employees (UCFE)
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program was established by the Tax Reform Act, employers have reported individual earnings statements and the amount of taxes withheld (including federal income tax, Social Security tax, and Medicare tax) on a single form (Form W-2 Wage and Tax Statement)
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Filing is required -- at the aggregate employment level -- for each nonagricultural employee earning at least $1,500 in any quarter of the year or for each employee who was employed for part or all of a day in any 20 different weeks of the year.6 Although Form 940 does report annual total compensation, it does not report the number of employees. However, the compensation information may be useful for benchmarking compensation data reported on other federal tax forms, such as Form W-2 and Form 941, as well as the UI data.
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EQUAL OPPORTUNITY SURVEY PILOT In order to identify federal contractors with potential problems of pay discrimination that could warrant further review or evaluation by OFCCP or to support a contractor self-audit, OFCCP has long been interested in developing a screening tool to enable the agency to identify supply and service contractors whose compensation data indicate that further investigation is warranted. This interest led to initiation of a pilot survey to collect earnings data with demographic and job group information from federal government contractors.
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From page 35... ...
, plus other earnings such as cost-of-living allowance, hazard pay, or other increment paid to all employees regardless of tenure on the job, extrapolated and expressed in terms of a full year."10 The annual monetary compensation measure was not to include the value of benefits, overtime, or one-time payments, such as relocation expenses. The survey did obtain annual monetary compensation information -- 98.3 percent of respondents provided a numerical response to the compensation item.
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From page 36... ...
Using data from the BLS 2004 National Compensation Survey, the total annual cost imposed on the regulated community by the survey requirements was close to $6 million. However, whether this level of burden was large or small compared with other regulatory requirements was not established, nor was the burden considered in relationship to the costs to employees of instances of wage discrimination that the survey might help uncover.
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From page 37... ...
Earnings Data Collection in New Mexico As reported by Martha Burk in a presentation to the panel, in 2003 the New Mexico state legislature created a Pay Equity Task Force to study wage disparities between men and women and between minorities and nonminorities in both the public and private sectors. The task force issued a report with numerous recommendations, and, in January 2009 Governor Bill Richardson issued an executive order declaring pay equity a priority for the state.13 In September 2009, the Pay Equity Task Force issued a report addressing pay gaps and job segregation in the state workforce and in the workforce of state contractors.
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have employees in only one job category besides the owner/manager. Moreover, job segregation by gender is not unusual, in which case gender pay disparities cannot be computed because of lack of wage data for both genders.
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From page 39... ...
If employers do not have such a system to classify employees by job category, gender, time worked, and compensation levels, the state has provided an alternative downloadable employee data entry spreadsheet for performing the necessary calculations "from scratch." Using this spreadsheet, employers enter employee identification, job category, gender, whether full or part time, total annual compensation, and total hours worked for each employee. Standard formulas for computing the gaps are embedded in required spreadsheets, which are provided to employers online, and the results of the computations are exported to a standard final report format.
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From page 40... ...
It involves canvassing all Ontario employers using a simple form that employers populate to provide current compensation data: see Table 2-2. The raw data are submitted to the Pay Equity Office, which assesses the data to determine if a wage gap exists.
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SURVEY-BASED WAGE INFORMATION In this section we consider the experience of surveys that collect wage information, specifically, three BLS employer surveys: the National Compensation Survey (NCS) , the Current Employment Statistics (CES)
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. Among the products of the survey are estimated average hourly wages for over 800 occupations in approximately 80 metropolitan and selected nonmetropolitan localities, weekly and annual earnings and hours for fulltime workers, and earnings by work level that permit wage comparisons across occupational groups.
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Occupational Employment Statistics Survey The OES survey is a semiannual mail survey designed to measure occupational employment and wage rates among full- and part-time wage and salary workers in nonfarm establishments in the United States.20 The survey does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms, household workers, or unpaid family workers. The OES survey is a cooperative program between BLS and state workforce agencies (SWAs)
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. The data available from the OES include cross-industry occupational employment and wage estimates for over 500 areas, including the nation, states, and the District of Columbia, metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs)
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government statistical and enforcement agencies suggests that it might be feasible to collect earnings information by gender, race, and national origin in an EEOC data collection program. It also suggests that the EEOC may be able identify other data collections that could serve as sources of benchmarks to assist in validating the information that might be collected as part of a new reporting arrangement.
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