By Wendi Watts
You probably know what your profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn look like. But do you know what your organization’s profile on the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) new online database looks like? Attorney David Fortney recommends every employer check theirs out.
On the database’s home page, the DOL states that the site “aims to make the enforcement data, collected by these agencies in the exercise of their mission, accessible and searchable, using common search criteria, by the public.”
“This is something that I think is receiving little to no attention — that I really hope everyone pays attention to,” Fortney told the audience for a recent audio conference, 2011 Employer Update: New Laws, Regs, Enforcement Threats & Compliance Tactics. Fortney is co-founder of the law firm Fortney & Scott,, LLC, in Washington, D.C., and an editor of the monthly Federal Employment Law Insider.
“The DOL has created a new online resource, the online enforcement database. And in this database, the Labor Department is now allowing the public to see all of the Labor Department prior compliance and enforcement audit results, and you can sort it by zip code, you can sort it by industry sector, you can sort it by company name, any number of ways,” Fortney said.
“You can get wage and hour records, you can get the OSHA [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] compliance records, you can get your OFCCP [or Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs] audit results, and you can get your pension retirement benefit agency [EBSA] audit results, and other agencies. It’s all in one location and you can sort it by agency or you can sort it by multiple agencies.”
As part of the federal government’s effort to be more transparent, the DOL made public this database on enforcement actions and violations.
“This is the database that government used to use as a private database to frankly find out who’s a bad actor,” Fortney explained. “What they have done now is opened the database up with the thought that not only can the Labor Department enforcement agencies use it, so can other agencies. So the [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] can now look and say, ‘Geez, has this employer also been subject to OFCCP enforcement or wage and hour enforcement, etc.?’
“And under the new [Presidential] executive order and the underlying instructions, agencies are to coordinate, and it is not a secret that agencies will conclude that if an employer has been ‘noncompliant’ in one substantive area that it is perhaps more likely than not, according to many agencies, probably not being compliant in our area, too. And it will move you up in terms of enforcement priority and responses and result in closer scrutiny.”
But what employers and their attorneys are quickly discovering is that the “public” includes employees’ attorneys and unions.
“It’s not just the compliance agencies that use this,” Fortney said. “Plaintiff’s counsel who are looking for who they might target to bring class or collective actions, this is a terrific tool for them. Unions, in terms of who they might organize and the themes that might be used in organizing, are finding this useful.”
Fortney told the audio conference listeners that they need to go to the DOL’s new online database and see what information from the department’s agencies about their organizations is now public.
“This is still something that is still very early on. Although it’s been online, it isn’t receiving much critical attention,” Fortney said. “At a minimum, I think every well-counseled employer needs to know what is in its profile on this database because, frankly, a lot of others are already looking at that and making assessments. So you should be looking at it as well and doing the same thing. It’s a big deal.”
In the Coming Soon section of the DOL’s database website, the agency states that it is planning to:
- add searches by violation type, mine ID, accident, injury, etc.;
- provide an interactive dashboard;
- launch a mashup competition to encourage using the DOL’s enforcement data to promote workers’ safety and protect workers’ rights; and
- integrate the DOL’s database with other federal and state enforcement agencies’ data systems.