I want to welcome my first guest blogger…James D Voigt, attorney at Lavelle Law, Ltd.
No employer is happy to receive any inquiry from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Employers often put off dealing with notices from government agencies because they know it is almost always bad news. This is always the wrong call, but with the EEOC it is particularly dangerous. The EEOC has the authority to issue a request for information to any company at any time. The company need not respond, but if it does not the EEOC may escalate the request to an administrative subpoena. This document carries significant weight. The response time to object is a surprisingly short five days. In that five day window, the employer must file a request for revocation or modification of the subpoena. If it does not, the EEOC will pursue court action to enforce the subpoena. At that point raising an objection is too late. The Chicago office of the EEOC has been getting notoriously aggressive with these requests for information. Often, these requests are very sweeping and request information for employees or data that go far beyond any specific employee issue that has been presented to the EEOC. Objecting to these broad sweeping requests is often successful because so much of the information they seek is not relevant. But the best winning objection will be lost if not filed within five days. This five day limit is enforced strictly. It is common for the local federal court to bar an objection to an EEOC subpoena on the simple basis that the objection was filed as little as one day late. The end result is that the employer is now required to respond in detail to an overly broad EEOC request which could have been knocked out or at least reduced in scope with a timely objection.
The main take-away here is to take notices from administrative agencies seriously and get them into the hands of your legal advisors right away. This would include any notice from the IRS, Illinois Department of Revenue (IDOR), Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES), Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL), the EEOC, or any other agency. Each of these agencies operates under a set of administrative rules and these rules pack a legal punch that surprises most employers. Missing deadlines is often irreversible, and the agency on the other side of the dispute has no motivation to help you by granting extensions. Missing deadlines can result in entry of orders against your company, imposition or fines or costs, and even direct levying of your bank accounts. In each of these cases, the client pleads the same set of facts: “But I only received this one notice and thought there would be some other procedure before this result was finalized.”
The next time you receive a notice from any government agency, open and read it immediately. If there is anything in the notice that you do not understand, contact your legal advisor right away. This is also a good time to remind every employer of the need to maintain organized and well documented files for each employee. Detailed information about promotions, disciplinary actions, terminations, tardiness or attendance issues, are always helpful in responding to administrative proceedings. Be sure that your human resources department is on top of these issues, or consider using an outside human resources firm to assist you in doing so.
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