Tiny Labor Agency Struggles to Meet Huge Diversity Data Request

• FOIA includes thousands of company diversity reports

• Agency has made errors on non-objector list

By J. Edward Moreno, Bloomberg Law, Mar. 16, 2023

Federal contractors have until March 17 to object to their diversity data being disclosed by the Labor Department as part of an open-records request process that has now taken over six months and has been riddled with delays and errors.

The DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs has struggled to produce an accurate list of contractors who don’t object to their workforce diversity data being disclosed in response to a massive Freedom of Information Act request from a journalism nonprofit.

The small subagency that enforces antidiscrimination laws and standards on companies that do business with the government has released lists of non-objectors that contained errors and has rolled over the deadline to object several times. Information from companies that don’t object—such as Oracle Inc. and Laboratory Corp.—will be released first, then the agency will make a call on whether the objections submitted are valid or not.

Read more here.