Friday, October 20, 2023: OFCCP’s FY 2023 Back Pay Collections Now Stop its Four-Year Downward Spiral by Exceeding its FY 2022 Collections
Following a flurry of 10 FY 2023 discrimination law settlements OFCCP belatedly published only last week (week of October 18th), and all signed in the last three days of FY 2023 with 6 of them on the very last working day of the Fiscal Year, OFCCP pushed up its total back pay collections for FY 2023 (thus far) to $13,815, 464.18. This is up from the $9,779,529.79 OFCCP had publicly reported through October 15, 2023 as we wrote about here. FY 2023 ended Saturday September 30, 2023.
The volume of last-minute end-of-Fiscal Year settlements, their late reporting to the public, and their higher monetary value also set new records for OFCCP. While we are not sure the agency is finished yet with late reports of discrimination law settlements (since it has now trickled out over 15 of them two to three weeks after Fiscal Year 2023 ended), OFCCP has thus far reported 35 Conciliation Agreements for FY 2023 settling discrimination claims it made against covered federal Government contractors, 13 of them (37%) occurred in the fourth Quarter of FY 2023. Moreover, those 4th Quarter settlements were worth $9,868,294.18 or 71% of OFCCP’s (thus far) total back pay collections in FY 2023.
NOTE: Prior OFCCP Administrations had tried to curb OFCCP’s historic habit of a swelled end-of-year settlement push by seeking to level settlements more evenly throughout each quarter of the Fiscal Year. OFCCP has now clearly reverted, however, to its prior “run fast at the end of the race” settlement strategy as we reported last week and a year ago. OFCCP’s end of year settlement push this past Fiscal Year was simply later and larger than that of previous years.
OFCCP’s enforcement production to date for FY 2023 of over $13 million has now increased its FY 2022 production (of $11,763,447) by 17%. The FY 2023 back pay collection uptick, however, is still only about half of OFCCP’s $26 million plus back pay collection in FY 2021 and almost two thirds less than the $35 million plus in the last year of the Trump Administration.
And, of course, this year’s increase in back pay collections to $13 million pales by comparison to OFCCP’s record $40 million plus the agency raked in during the penultimate year (FY 2019) before the Trump Administration left office (as we reported then and summarized in our Week In Review story last Monday October 16, 2023 and hyperlinked, above). So, OFCCP’s FY 2023 back pay collections was a nice (and needed) rebound, but with a l-o-n-g way back to its “glory days” only a few short years ago.
We will continue to follow the saga of OFCCP’s FY 2023 back pay collections to determine if the agency is now done, or whether the spigot is still trickling discrimination law settlements out every few days like a short order cook serving up diner food.