How to File a Charge of Employment Discrimination U S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

In fiscal year 2024, the agency restored in-person intake appointments as an option for charging parties and offered video appointments, providing greater flexibility to charging parties. The EEOC also initiated expanded presence goals in each district to conduct outreach and intake interviews in underserved areas of each district’s jurisdiction. Performance Measure 2 encourages the EEOC’s litigation program to continue to strive for excellence by maintaining its record of successful resolutions. Successful resolutions include cases decided by favorable court order and those concluded through a consent decree or a settlement agreement. Achieving success for this measure will ensure that the EEOC continues to exercise its prosecutorial discretion responsibly, while allowing the agency to take on challenging issues and litigate complex cases, including cases of systemic discrimination. This measure is significant because achieving success in cases raising priority issues under the Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP) is often challenging and resource-intensive, especially in cases involving emerging or developing issues and systemic cases.

Providing Employers with Fee-Based Training

The PWFA provides workers with limitations related to pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions the right to reasonable accommodations, absent undue hardship to the employer. The EEOC addressed over 99,000 comments provided by the public in response to the agency’s proposed regulation to implement the PWFA and published the final rule implementing the PWFA in the Federal Register (89 FR (Apr. 19, 2024)). The final rule included an Interpretive Guidance with plain language explanations of key PWFA terms and 78 fact-based examples showing how the regulation would operate in practice. The EEOC also prepared user-friendly PWFA resource documents, trainings, and videos, including an update of the technical assistance document, What You Should Know About the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. By developing a strong and clear message for use in budget documents and other publications, the EEOC demonstrates the nexus between its budget requests, allocations and operating plans, and the achievement of its mission and vision.

How Do I Find Out the Status of a Charge if I Don’t Have Internet Access?

• The RF serves as the mechanism through which the EEOC can collect payments, thus offsetting some of the costs devoted to training and technical assistance to external entities, allowing the agency to offer more non-fee-based outreach events to those populations less able to pay for training.
• During fiscal year 2023, the agency through its federal sector Outreach Training and Engagement Division (OTED) created a repository outline, with content including leading practices, position descriptions, and training for workforce inclusion.
• Targeted, equitable relief includes any non-monetary and non-generic relief that explicitly addresses the discriminatory employment practices at issue in the case, and which provides remedies to the aggrieved individuals or prevents similar violations in the future.
• The EEOC’s federal sector appellate program adjudicates appeals from federal agency final decisions on employment discrimination complaints, including those following a decision by an EEOC administrative judge, and ensures agency compliance with orders issued on those appeals.
• Performance Measure 6 builds on the EEOC’s previous Strategic Plan with a metric focused on quality in both the private and federal sector programs.
• This will be accomplished by using analytics and metrics to directly measure the impact of each effort to reach communities.

Through its Office of Federal Operations (OFO), the EEOC provides leadership and guidance to federal agencies on all aspects of the federal government’s equal employment opportunity program. Moreover, OFO adjudicates appeals from administrative decisions made by federal agencies on EEO complaints. The EEOC’s federal sector appellate program adjudicates appeals from federal agency final decisions on employment discrimination complaints, including those following a decision by an EEOC administrative judge, and ensures agency compliance with orders issued on those appeals.

How Do I Use the Online System to Check the Status of a Charge?

The EEOC receives a congressional appropriation to fund the necessary expenses of enforcing civil rights legislation, as well as prevention, outreach, and coordination of activities within the private and public sectors. These programs provide fee-based education and training relating to the laws administered by the Commission. Additionally, through OFP’s State, Local, and Tribal Program, the EEOC maintains work- sharing agreements and a contract services program with 90 state and local FEPAs for the purpose of coordinating the investigation of charges dual-filed under state and local laws and federal law, as appropriate. The EEOC partners with at least 60 TEROs to promote equal employment opportunity on or near Native American/Alaska Native Tribal lands.

Federal Sector Enforcement, Activities, and Outreach

You will receive an email from the EEOC Public Portal notifying you and your representative (if you have one who also has registered in the Portal) whenever agencies or the EEOC upload documents. The email will list the type of document, when it was uploaded, and instruct you to login to the Public Portal to access and view the document. The representative must select the button next to “I represent a charging party or complainant.”  After signing up for the EEOC Public Portal, the representative can log in, go to the My Case page, and select the link for the appeal they wish to access. They can then download documents from the appellate record and submit documentation for the matter. Removing the considerable barriers of old technology, transforming the EEOC to support fully digital services, and providing staff and partners with a modern system, has better enabled the agency to carry out its critical mission. Additionally, each year, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) reports on what it has determined are the most serious management and performance challenges facing the EEOC.

Strategic Goal III: Strive for Organizational Excellence Through Our People, Practices, and Technology.

• Offices assign cases to Administrative Judges based upon the order of receipt, as well as the workload of the office.
• According to these agreements, if you file a charge with either EEOC or a FEPA, the charge also will be automatically filed with the other agency.
• The information you provide to the  EEOC is confidential and will not be sent to your employer during the EEOC’s investigation.
• Addressing systemic employment discrimination on all protected bases is a top priority for the EEOC, and this year systemic litigation continued to account for a sizeable portion of the EEOC’s litigation caseload, representing 12% of all merits suits filed.
• The EEOC Public Portal can only be used for the hearing and appeals stages of a federal discrimination complaint.
• The agency updated terminology and links in its What You Should Know about COVID-19 and the ADA, the Rehabilitation Act, and Other EEO Laws and participated in the Interagency Long COVID Coordination Council.
• Participants continued to view the EEOC’s voluntary mediation program as highly effective, fair, and neutral, and expressed strong satisfaction with the process.

These federal laws include, among others, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. You will be able to access status information through the public portal on the My Case page. When you login to your account on the EEOC Public Portal, you can see all the documents the agency submitted as well as documents you have submitted. Both parties will need to follow the Administrative Judge’s instructions for submitting documents and communications during the hearing process. All documents can be submitted to the Portal and doing so allows you, your representative, the Administrative Judge, and the agency to easily review and track the entire case file. You can submit motions, responses to the agency’s motions and responses to the Administrative Judge’s orders through the Portal.

In fiscal year 2024, the Training Institute conducted 252 virtual and in-person CST events that reached approximately 11,156 registrants and included Respectful Workplaces employee training and Leading for Respect manager and supervisor training. The EEOC also partners with TEROs to share resources and provide information regarding employment discrimination. For example, the EEOC conducted detailed training for TEROs and provided a comprehensive desk reference on how to recognize potential unlawful employment discrimination and to work with the EEOC to help address it on and off tribal lands. Further, the EEOC’s State and Local and Tribal Programs webpages provide eeoc portal videos of the EEOC’s history with FEPAs and TEROs, as well as an animated video that highlights the various ways members of the public can contact the EEOC to file charges of discrimination. The Tribal Programs webpage also contains a new PSA intended for tribal communities to help direct them to the EEOC or to TEROs regarding potential unlawful employment discrimination matters. The PSA is available in several versions to accommodate different types of media outlets that may run the video.