Charles James, Sr., Director of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), revealed several new initiatives planned for that agency during a keynote address he made earlier this month in Dallas. The event, the National Industry Liaison Group (NILG) Conference, is an annual meeting of OFCCP, EEOC, consultants, attorneys, and EEO/AA specialists to promote open and frank communication between the enforcement agencies and the public — federal contractors in particular. The Maly consultants who attended will post their full notes on our website within the next few weeks. In the interim, here is a brief recap of director James' remarks as well as remarks from some other noted speakers.

• In an attempt to target companies that have not been audited in the past, the OFCCP is developing a "contractor database." One use of the data collected will be to compare employers' EEO-1 Report responses regarding their contractor status to known contracts.
  
  
• Additionally, the data collected (currently covering a 10-year period) will give the OFCCP a company's "corporate compliance profile" or "scorecard." This report card will serve multiple purposes that include informing CEOs — and government contracting officers — of a company's compliance status. It will also be used to "connect the dots" between audits from many different entities within one corporation. Currently, most compliance reviews are merely stand-alone affairs and what happens in one audit doesn't have an effect on a review somewhere else in the company. This will most likely change.
  
  
• The OFCCP's new Director of Program Operations, Patsy Baker Blackshear, said the agency has begun to monitor compliance with Executive Order 13201, commonly referred to as the "Beck poster ruling." (See our "Compliance Alert" of June 23, 2005.) She noted that in addition to posting the notice for union employees, certain contractors also need to put a Beck notice clause in their covered subcontracts and purchase orders.
  
  
• Blackshear also discussed the agency's hiring of a testing expert and warned contractors that the OFCCP will begin evaluating contractors' use of employment tests and that a contractor's test validation studies must meet the requirements set forth in the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures (41 CFR 60-3.15B).
  
  
• Approaches to analyzing compensation were addressed in three separate sessions by PhDs Dan Biddle, Murray Simpson, and Sharon Kelly. Dan Biddle and Sharon Kelly outlined the use of multiple regression while Murray Simpson argued for the use of a "forensic decision analysis." Regression as used by the OFCCP analyzes current pay rates of current employees. The "forensic decision analysis" tests a history of pay decisions. Although the OFCCP is using regression during audits, guidelines have yet to be finalized and contractors are left to use any compensation analysis they deem appropriate.

If you have any questions about any information presented here, please give us a call or send us an email.