OFCCP Makes Scheduling Announcement List Available and Then Withdraws List

At the 2012 National Industry Liaison Group (NILG) conference in Hawaii, OFCCP announced that it would be making its scheduling announcement list publically available on its website as a service to federal contractors.  The scheduling announcement list is the list of companies that would be received a pre-scheduling notice from OFCCP informing these companies that they would be subject to an affirmative action compliance review.  These pre-scheduling notices (formally called a corporate scheduling announcement letter or CSAL) are NOT the letter actually opening a review.  Instead, they are, in OFCCP's words, a "courtesy notification" of an impending review.  (For more information on CSALs, see our earlier blog post on this subject.)

On Thursday, July 18, 2013, OFCCP made a portion of the 2012-13 scheduling announcement list publically available on its website.  The list could be viewed at http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/SAL/SAL_MidAtlantic.htm. By the next day, however, the list had my disappeared from the website.  At the 2013 NILG conference in Indianapolis, which occurred at the end of July, OFCCP explained that the scheduling announcement list had been posted in error and that the agency had not intended for the list to be publically released.  OFCCP has made no further commitments to making its scheduling announcement list available on its website.

Reaction from federal contractors and subcontractors to having the scheduling announcement list posted on the OFCCP website has been mixed.  Some large contractors were looking forward to having one source to review in order to determine how many establishments would be undergoing a compliance review.  OFCCP no longer sends a unified listing of all establishments at a company that will be undergoing review to a corporate headquarters office, instead sending the pre-scheduling notice directly to the establishment that will be undergoing review.  This has been a problem for certain larger organizations.  However, some contractors, both large and small, have been troubled by the idea of having the names of establishments to be reviewed released to the general public.