DE Talk | Ask the OFCCP Experts: What’s to Come in 2020

Season 1 • Episode 4

For government contractors, the regulatory landscape is always changing, and navigating these changes takes a careful understanding of the current requirements and a forward-looking view. I sat down with employment law expert John C. Fox of Fox, Wang, & Morgan to identify what you should be doing to prepare yourself for the coming year and how to position your company for successful compliance in 2020!

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About DE Talk

For DirectEmployers, it’s all about valuable connections and meaningful conversations. This monthly podcast features honest and open dialogue between powerhouse industry experts on a variety of HR topics ranging from OFCCP compliance advice to emerging recruitment marketing trends, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and insightful solutions that help infuse new life into your HR strategies.

Hosted by Candee Chambers, Executive Director of DirectEmployers Association.

Episode Guest

Episode Transcript

Candee Chambers:
Hello, my name is Candee Chambers with DirectEmployers Association and I would like to welcome you to our fourth episode of the DE Talk podcast. When looking back at 2019, we can easily say it’s been a busy year for the OFCCP. New directives, pending regulatory issues and significant events are coming in 2020 and you need to be prepared for what’s coming. This is why I sat down with employment law expert, John C. Fox of Fox, Wang & Morgan to discuss all of this and more. Today, we will be giving you an x-ray of what counts and we will blend our knowledge from a practitioner standpoint with John’s encyclopedic legal knowledge of everything OFCCP, so you can position your company for successful compliance in 2020. While compliance can certainly be a dry topic, hopefully we’ll bring a fresh perspective and of course some comedic banter.

And with that, I’d like to introduce John Fox and I’m going to put him up first for some questions and comments about what we can expect in 2020.

John C. Fox:
Well Candee, I’m delighted to be here and I think the theme for 2020 continues to be what we saw pretty much in 2019, which is that OFCCP will continue to be haunted by its past. Specifically, I think most people are aware that there are several thousand old audits, some of them going back to the end of the Bush the son administration, but many from the early years even of the Obama administration, 2010, 2011, 2012, and cleaning up that past remains a major priority and indeed I might say that at the National Industrial Liaison group meeting in Milwaukee this past summer, where I polled the 800 people in that audience about their most important concerns about OFCCP, this was the number one concern, that these old audits are still there dogging us, and we’ll talk a little bit about what the future holds there, but it’s a three year dig out still lying ahead of us. It’s not over this year as OFCCP had hoped.

Candee Chambers:
Well, you bring up a really interesting point, but they sent out 3,500 CSALs—they didn’t send out the—I’m still in the CSAL being a letter, but it’s corporate scheduling announcement lists now where they don’t actually notify the recipient, but they put a list out on their website. But they sent or advertised a 3,500 establishment CSAL, and they’re going to do that again in the spring. So what’s up with that?

John C. Fox:
So you have to pay attention to the difference between starts of an audit and completions of an audit. And what’s happening is that they’re starting very, very few audits, relatively speaking from that March 25th, 2019 CSAL list, which had 3,500 corporate establishments listed on it. They’ve probably done not more than 700 or 800 of those, and almost 400 of those are going to be Section 503 focused reviews, of which there are a total of 500 in that 3,500 establishment batch from March of 2019. So what you’re seeing is a lot of closures right now. In fact, Craig Leen, the Director of OFCCP, has doubled the number of closures of audits from the same time last year when they were looking at their 2018 results. So they’re closing a lot, but it’s all this leftover deadwood from the Bush administration and the Obama administration. But my point to you is Candee that there’s still a whole lot more. In fact, Craig Leen had hoped that this would be the year they would retire all these old cases that they call aged, A-G-E-D cases. But the reality is they are still working on the four year old or older and are going to spend the next two years at least cleaning up the three years old and older and the two years old and older.

Candee Chambers:
So you brought up a really important point. The OFCCP has been very aggressive in getting a lot of regulations out, a lot of directives, a lot of ideas, opinion letters. Wow, when have we seen opinion letters? But I know we’re going to try and focus on 2020 but coming up in 2020 are the VEVRAA focused reviews and more completion of the Section 503 focused reviews. But there is a big election in November and there’s less than a year before the election takes place. And especially with the news of the day right now, who knows what’s going to happen moving forward and how likely do you think it’s going to be that the OFCCP is going to get anything accomplished?

John C. Fox:
Well, there’s going to be two different levels of accomplishment, if you will. One is the nonpolitical day in and day out work of the agency. They’ve got to start audit, they’ve got to close audits, but the other issues are the politically charged or politically controversial issues like rulemaking and the religious exemption.

Candee Chambers:
That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about too, so go on.

John C. Fox:
But what happens in every election year previously for a presidential election is that at some point, the White House, whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, shuts down all of the executive branch agencies so that they don’t influence the election by doing something that’s controversial-

Candee Chambers:
Stupid.

John C. Fox:
And yeah, stupid, that’s going to impact adversely some constituents group that might vote for the president, so we’ll have to watch with interest whether this president, who is so different from so many predecessor presidents, is immune to that and just keep steaming on with his agenda or whether there comes a point perhaps in the early June, July period, which is where we normally see the agencies shutting down. You see directors of agencies not being able to say anything on the public record. At my annual NELI, National Employment Law Institute conference, which I’ve held for 38 years in October, with the OFCCP director as the first speaker of that two day conference typically, I have a hard time in presidential election years because they either are not authorized to speak at all or if they are authorized to speak, they’re given a White House script that says nothing and you wonder why you even invited them to speak.

Candee Chambers:
So we’ll have to see what happens next year because this year we had such success with Craig Leen doing our fireside chat type phenomenon and it was highly successful. I wonder what will happen in October.

John C. Fox:
Well, we’ll just have to see you if they continue to defy gravity at the White House as they have been doing. They just haven’t been very concerned about what the press thinks or doesn’t think so maybe they’ll just keep going. But in the meantime, doing the day in and day out activity of the agency, here’s the game plan that is unfolding but I think it’s subject to amendment on the fly because there’s still a lot of deadwood to clear here.

They are expecting to finish all of the four year old or older audits this calendar year, 2019. They’re behind on those. They had wanted to close them by the end of the fiscal year, September 30th of 2019. Craig Leen extended that for a month to the end of October, but they still have a very large number of four year old or older audits pending.

Candee Chambers:
So basically our listeners who are government contractors have to just be patient yet again.

John C. Fox:
And if I were sitting on some four year old or older audits as a number of my clients are, we’re pushing forward to bring this to the national office’s attention and get some resources on it to close them because at this point, a district director has three choices given what Director Leen has said. They either need to administratively close the audit or they need to sign a conciliation agreement with the contractor if they think there’s a problem or they need to fold up their tent and make a recommendation to the solicitor’s office to file a complaint to seek enforcement against the contractor who they think is violating one or more of their statutes.

Candee Chambers:
Well, and I think it’s really difficult having been in that position. When you sit there as a government contractor and you hear nothing from the OFCCP for three or four or five, we had an audit with a nuclear power plant at one of my previous employers and we didn’t hear anything from them for probably seven years. And it’s hard to understand why if there’s a burning issue, why it took so long to make any big deal of it. So I think a lot of them are having them administratively closed. I think the benefit though of getting them administratively closed before the end of September when the OFCCP’s fiscal year ended was much more likely now that we’re mid year, going to be mid year very soon.

John C. Fox:
Big surge in August, September. It’s abated now, but they’re still closing some, but very slowly and not getting to nirvana. They’re not getting to the goal line that Craig gets thrown down in a very reasonable, not generous deadline, given that many of these audits are six, seven, eight years old. What else do you need? You need to get on it.

Candee Chambers:
By the way, that nuclear power plant audit closed beautifully, with no conciliation. I just want to throw that out there, but you know what, let’s get on into 2020. One of the things that he started talking about and it took you and I by a huge surprise when we were at the OFCCP for the NELI presentation with Craig and he threw out something that I think we both just had wide eyed looks at him and that was the inclusion of military spouses in the VEVRAA focused reviews. And I think you and I, and God knows you’ve been working with the OFCCP for a very long time and I was dumbfounded by that and I think you were too.

John C. Fox:
Oh sure.

Candee Chambers:
I even said-

John C. Fox:
My jaw dropped and I immediately asked him, “Well, wait a minute Craig, what are you saying? Are you saying that military spouses are protected by VEVRAA?” And he shot back immediately, “Of course. Yes.”

Candee Chambers:
I thought it was very interesting. John, do you remember when he said, “Well, that’s what my legal is telling me.” It’s coming from the solicitor’s office obviously, so that surprised me.

John C. Fox:
Let’s unpack this a little bit though because VEVRAA, the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 and OFCCP’s regulations do not protect anybody but protected veterans.

Candee Chambers:
But they’re talking about the relationship clause.

John C. Fox:
So what they’re doing is that they are, and it’s in their regs as you suggest, there’s a relationship non-discrimination component to those 2014 regs that went to final that says if you discriminate against somebody because they’re in a relationship with a protected veteran, that that’s unlawful. This was something they borrowed from the ADA in 1990, which prohibited relationship discrimination. So if you are the personal assistant pushing somebody’s wheelchair and you apply for work somewhere and they’re concerned that you’re going to be too distracted at work because you’re going to be subject to going to assist this other person because of their disability that may cause them to take on more need on any particular day, that would be unlawful discrimination. But here, what they’ve been saying is just a flat-out prohibition on not hiring a spouse of an active duty service member. Now I’m about the most sympathetic person on the planet to this issue, I would think. I was a military brat.

Candee Chambers:
Brat is, there’s no pun intended with that.

John C. Fox:
And so, I grew up in 17 states and two continents before the age of 17 and saw my mother struggle in every location we moved to around the country and out of country trying to find a job that was going to last between two and six months at best, and that problem has not abated. It’s still a challenge. The only thing that has really helped military spouses so far by the way is working via remote. That has been a real boon to military spouses and I know a lot of military spouses who have been able to work full time because they’re online or they’re on the telephone.

Candee Chambers:
So there’s a good point to all of our government contractor listeners. I get the question a lot from our members about adding military spouses to their veteran health identification. And you can do just about anything you want with a veteran health ID. You cannot with Section 503 but with veterans health ID, you can add Vietnam era veterans. You can add whatever you really want, but I would strongly recommend that you do not include military spouses. It’s one of those things that if you ask for something, you have to think about what you’re going to do with that information and if you’re in a situation now where they’re going to be doing VEVRAA focused reviews, they’re going to be looking at your treatment of military spouses and then they see that you’re asking if your candidates are military spouses and you know that and you don’t hire a person, you’re opening yourself up, I believe for unnecessary concern on behalf of the OFCCP. Do you agree?

John C. Fox:
I agree and I think we ought to note that the VEVRAA, excuse me, the VEVRAA focused reviews have not yet begun. The scheduling letter that OFCCP has sent to the Office of Management and Budget, that arm of the White House that approves all paperwork of the federal executive agencies, has not yet approved the scheduling letter for the VEVRAA audits, all of which are going to be focused reviews. We understand from a September supplement to the March 2019 CSAL that there will be 500 of these in 2020 to start whenever the audit scheduling letter is approved.

Now something is hung up there. It’s not getting done. It’s way overdue. They had wanted to launch this on Veteran’s Day as you might imagine, very appropriate, but that’s come and gone and now it’s two months in the rear view mirror at this point and they still don’t have that approved. So there’s a hang up there. But when they do start, they are going to check in on this spouse issue. And so the admonition I would give to everybody is to train your recruiters as to how to answer the question about whether they hire military spouses. What many of them might confuse is their reluctance to hire somebody who is a part time or short time employee as opposed to refusing to hire somebody who is a military spouse. Those are two different things.

Candee Chambers:
Well, I think the one thing that the OFCCP does not understand is that if an organization does not have remote work capabilities and the military spouse that they may or may not hire cannot take that job and go around the country or the world and still do that job. If they don’t have that opportunity in that company, then the cost of turnover is outrageous. It’s more than just the cost of hiring. So I mean, they have the recruiting all over again, the hiring costs, the training costs, which are incredibly expensive. So the OFCCP needs to understand that not every company can bring in a person that can only work two to six months, for instance.

John C. Fox:
But here’s something that a lot of-

Candee Chambers:
And I’m all about hiring military spouses. I don’t want to go on record that I’m not, but that’s a concern.

John C. Fox:
A lot of HR managers forget however, when they say, “Well, we don’t want to hire somebody who’s only going to be here for two or three months.”, that their average turnover rate may be less than that. They may have somebody, their workforce may only be there for two months. If you’re at a fast food restaurant or a 7-Eleven, their turnover is 400% a year on average. But certainly 300%. I mean you’re turning over every four months anyway.

Candee Chambers:
Right. I’m talking about a longterm professional organization where they want a career for instance. So anyway, let me move forward. We have a brand new person at the OFCCP and he is the new Ombudsman and I’ve met Marcus Stergio on a couple of occasions. He seems like a great guy and I know he’s going to be putting together, I guess a TAG or something, a transition assistance guide, kind of a guideline or whatever to let people know how to interact with the Ombudsman. But I think we still always have to remember he’s an employee of the OFCCP. So what is your take on Marcus in that role? Not Marcus, but the role?

John C. Fox:
The role is a relatively new one for the agency. They’ve tried the Ombud approach a couple of times before. It hasn’t lasted physically very long, a couple of months and it hasn’t been defined. So Marcus is going to have the opportunity, indeed the requirement to really lay down a channel that contractors understand and feel comfortable to enter to deal with problems in audits and bypass the district director and/or the regional director and deal with him instead of dealing direct with the field staff of OFCCP. I think that’s going to be very dicey. He’s expecting to publish this month actually a very large document as you suggest, Candee. We don’t know if it will take the form of a technical assistance guide, a TAG as you mentioned, or whether it will be just a white paper explaining how to engage his services and get a resolution in a comfortable, graceful way.

But when that comes out, a lot of people will be reading that with great interest to see how they can use the mediator without sacrificing the years and years of investment that many professionals in the affirmative action area have building relationships with the district directors and the regional directors. For companies that are new to government contracting, for employees of those companies or their vendors or their counsel who do not have relationships with the OFCCP investigators, they may be more prone to use the Ombud program, but I don’t know that I expect a lot of people who have a deep and long relationships with the investigators to go around them and sacrifice those expensive longterm relationships.

Candee Chambers:
Oh yeah, I think so. I think you’re exactly right. I have invited Marcus to the annual meeting for DirectEmployers in 2020.

John C. Fox:
This is the one in Fort Worth?

Candee Chambers:
Yes, and he is planning on being there, so I think that will be a great opportunity for people to get to know him on a personal basis, because you’re right, relationships kind of drive all of the things that you need and want from the OFCCP and I think it would be good for people to get to know him as well. I was very impressed by him, so hopefully he will have some good feedback from some of our members.

John C. Fox:
I think there’s a timing issue there as well. Do you go to Marcus when maybe your matter has percolated not only to the district office but it’s percolated up to the regional office and indeed it’s percolated into the national office and the enforcement division is looking at this. And then what do you do? Timeout guys, I want to go talk to Marcus, how he relates to not just the field staff but also the national staff that have their fingers in the enforcement pie is also another puzzle.

Candee Chambers:
Well, I think contractors are always nervous about upsetting the compliance officers and going over their head. But I was in Detroit last week or two weeks ago, I guess last week for the American Society of Employers Conference. And Lauren Hicks, who used to be the Indianapolis district director, made the comment that if her compliance officers got things wrong, that she wanted contractors to reach out to her because they need to know if they’re telling the contractor community something inappropriate. And I cited a few situations. I got to just throw this out there, but I had a compliance officer tell me that the listing requirement, which everyone knows is my soap box, was a requirement for Section 503 and for individuals with disabilities. And I said I beg to differ. And I told her that the regulation, I of course could cite it perfectly, but it’s part of the VEVRAA regulations. And so I’m pretty excited actually about the VEVRAA focused reviews because that’s going to be one of the biggest things they ask for right off the bat. So I’m pretty excited about that.

John C. Fox:
Well, I think everybody’s hoping that this Ombud program will prove valuable, but I think everybody’s holding their breath a little bit skeptical, not sure how-

Candee Chambers:
How to use it-

John C. Fox:
And just like to slowly work out here.

Candee Chambers:
Yeah, I think you’re right. So interestingly enough, we just found out right before we came in here today about the new budget that is sitting on President Trump’s desk right now. So what do you think about that? It’s more money than the OFCCP’s seen in several years.

John C. Fox:
Well, two things happened here. One, the Senate and the House have rebuffed the White House pretty firmly. They sent a small message, a small but firm message. OFCCP only wanted its same budget that it had in 2018 and had in 2019, which was $103,476,000 and the Congress.

Candee Chambers:
You remember that to the dollar, John.

John C. Fox:
Yeah, I wonder why you would be remembering odd whole numbers like that.

Candee Chambers:
I don’t know, but I’m pretty proud of myself.

John C. Fox:
But this is the first time in over a decade that the Congress has given OFCCP more money than they asked for.

Candee Chambers:
What do you think they’re trying to tell them?

John C. Fox:
They’ve given them $105,976,000.

Candee Chambers:
So almost $106 million. So two and a half million more.

John C. Fox:
Two and a half million more, which is in round numbers, a little over 2% more. Not a big deal, but it’s a symbol. It’s a subtle message. The White House had wanted to take down all of the employment agencies, NLRB, EOC, et cetera. And the Congress said no. But the other thing about this budget is it’s a Christmas tree budget. Everybody got everything that they wanted, Republicans, Democrats, the White House. There’s over $1 billion in border wall here. So the White House is ecstatic about that. But the budget is very large and OFCCP shared in it and I’m personally very interested in this because as you know, I’ve been saying for 10 years, I thought this agency is too small to continue to manage itself. It needs more budget, it needs more employees to be a proper professional agency. So this is a step in the right direction and I know that Craig Leen will use the money wisely.

Candee Chambers:
Well, they’ve got the religious exemption sitting out there and the use of PDMs and the most important one that I see and one we could probably talk for two hours, don’t worry, we won’t but is the affirmative action plan verification project. When I first saw the amount of this budget that is most likely going to be approved by the president hopefully yet today so there is not a government shutdown, and interestingly enough, we reported on it when Craig had mentioned it at NELI last year and then we quickly rescinded that. But now it’s out in the open, everybody’s talking about this potential AAP verification. What do you think this money, this additional money is going to provide to help that move forward?

John C. Fox:
So the AAP verification project is something that Craig has championed very much.

Candee Chambers:
And good for him. I think it’s a great idea to tell you the truth.

John C. Fox:
For those of you who are not familiar with it, there are 25,000 approximately covered government contractors every year. The number changes a little bit depending on the contracting activity each year, year in and year out and they typically have somewhere between 175,000 and 200,000 AAP establishments. But the Government Accounting Office in 2016 projected that there were about 76% of contractors that were not preparing their affirmative action plans at all, and they documented that instead of contractors that had affirmative action plans, having them ready to deliver to OFCCP within 30 days of receiving the audit scheduling letter, the average intake was 67 days after the audit scheduling letter. So a lot of noncompliance in having the affirmative action plans ready to go.

That’s not far different, by the way, from what the Carter administration found in 1977 when they estimated that 70%, 7-0 percent of government contractors did not have AAPs properly in place. So the idea has been to find a solution by looking at everybody’s AAPs. They quickly realized as they thought through the volume that they were probably going to have to do this over a five year rolling period and ask 5,000 companies per year to deliver their one, two or three AAPs depending on their jurisdictional coverage. But if you do the math, if everybody had three AAPs, you’d be looking at intaking almost 600,000 affirmative action plans, and they didn’t have a way to do that other than to do it electronically. Their regs don’t require that. So they’re going to have to start by amending their regs and then the next part of that that leads to your question now with that background, I can get to it, they need a lot of computing power and a portal to receive all of that and a lot of security around all of that because this is a lot of paper.

Candee Chambers:
Well, and I think when Craig first started talking about this, I think his thoughts have maybe moved a little bit, because I think at first the thought was, do you have an AAP? Then they want to know if it’s a complete AAP, and then will they use the list of people who did not submit one as a potential audit possibility, and as we already know, because we’ve already seen it with our introduction of Taapestry our affirmative action planning business ourselves, we’ve seen people call and say, we need an affirmative action plan. And you know, a lot of people do that because they don’t have affirmative action plans. And then they get an audit letter and then they’re like, “Oh God, we need your help.” So I think that, I mean I applaud Craig for trying to ensure that every government contractor is meeting their requirements of having that affirmative action plan. But how do you think that they’re going to figure out if they’re good or not? How do you think they’re going to do that?

John C. Fox:
Oh, they’re just going to have compliance officers take a look to make sure that all the component parts are there without making any judgment about the quality of the submission. But you and I have been sounding the alarm for over a year now that this issue of verification of your AAPs is coming. And the question is not whether, but simply. When this budget is now a second clarion call to everybody to pay attention if you don’t have your AAPs in place because they are loading the gun, they’ve got the budget now that they had requested and more to build the computers out to create that electronic portal. So the next thing that they need to do is to get that regulation proposed and finalized to require electronic submission. And then they need to get OMB to approve a request letter from OFCCP requesting these verification AAP collections to occur.

Now, if the Democrats take the White House in the presidential election and in January of 2021 are running the show, I think this issue will take on a, an even more a heightened sense of importance and priority. So I would think that by the end of 2021 we might see this verification program come to be. If it, there’s another Trump, second term administration, it’ll work on whatever the schedule is that the office of management budget dictates as a function of politics and a function of budget than a function of just how many pieces of regulatory approval they can process at any given time. Cause there’s a lot going on in this government.

Candee Chambers:
Well they actually, Craig has also been talking about doing promotion focused reviews, which will also be something new and different. I know just again from my own experience as a practitioner, the fights that go on among leaders to define what a promotion is and the the attorneys have basic legal idea, but the actual interpretation or application in corporate America is totally different and it’s different by division. It’s different by department, I mean it’s different across the board.

John C. Fox:
Of course contractors have been required since 2000 to annually undertake promotion disparity analysis. I did not say adverse impact analysis. I said disparity analysis.

Candee Chambers:
I know. That’s John soapbox if you ever want to hear him go on and on about that.

John C. Fox:
Yeah, at the same time, OFCCP has not in the last 19 years since that rule went into effect that OFCCP prosecuted a single contractor for a violation of their disparities in promotion analysis. They do some occasional, depending on the year in question, promotion discrimination claims, one here, two there, but those are on an individual basis, not a systemic basis. So OFCCP has been quite generous is where I’m going with this to accept whatever pablum contractors feed them about what a promotion is or what that promotion pool is. But should the promotion focused reviews come to be, contractors are going to have to sit down for the first time in a meaningful way and define what their promotion pools are.

Candee Chambers:
They probably should anyway.

John C. Fox:
And then they’re going to have to define who is interested in a promotion because you’ll find a lot of people are not interested in promotions for lots of different reasons.

Candee Chambers:
And a lot of people are nitpicked, and what I used to see a lot of at both my prior employers were individuals who were paid overtime because of their particular job. And then they would be asked to move into supervisory positions, but they would make less money because they would lose their overtime and they would become an exempt employee and now with all the wage and hour stuff, I mean it’s going going to be an interesting process for the OFCCP, I believe.

John C. Fox:
Yeah, we’ll probably be putting a lot more energy into that in 2020 if and when the promotion focused reviews become a reality. Right now, it’s an aspiration at OFCCP but I think it’s near and dear to Craig’s heart. So if he’s got a second term in him, remember his clock is winding down. As a political appointee, you know one thing when you come in and that is you’re leaving, you just don’t know when.

Candee Chambers:
As you know. So yeah, I know I was at the legal town hall that Craig put on and he is adamant for the law firms that are government contractors, he’s adamant at looking at promotions from the associate ranks to the partnership ranks. And he even tried to push the partnership focus and the partners that were in the office were like, in the town hall said, “Well he can’t do anything with partners.” But Craig I think has a fight in him and he’s a very smart guy. So who knows what’s coming?

John C. Fox:
Well he surprised me a bit too in telling me, I don’t think I’m telling any stories out of school. I think he would probably approve of me relating that he worked in big law firms and he thought there was a lot of discrimination in those law firms and his point of view, what he observed and was concerned about. So I think having been a partner in the third largest law firm at one point, and I think the second largest firm in Northern California for many years and voted on partnership selection and spent a lot of time grooming associates to become partners, I can tell you, it is a very complex formula and there’s not one formula. Every law firm is different. They have their own different culture and their own different major elements that are important to them. And it changes over time. Last year, I needed a mergers and acquisitions partner. This year, I need a IP litigator. The marketplace interjects and influences this quite a bit too.

Candee Chambers:
And if you read the news on a daily basis, there’s one discrimination or lawsuit on discrimination every day at a different law firm and some of the biggest name law firms in the country today. And I mean Jones Day and I mean you just hear them constantly where they’re being sued by females that don’t believe that they’ve been treated fairly. So anyway, I think all of you that have heard John and I speak before could tell that we could go on just talking about compliance for probably the entire day. I really can’t think of a whole lot more fun things to do. Not sure John could, but please stay in tune for the things that are coming up in 2020. So John, I’d like to thank you for joining us today. We jokingly refer to you as a walking search engine. We joked around about we don’t need Google. We just need John Fox.

John C. Fox:
I remember now, $103,476,000 is the OFCCP’s budget last year.

Candee Chambers:
I don’t know where that came from.

John C. Fox:
But that’s great trivia. Take that to a cocktail party.

Candee Chambers:
Okay, yeah, everybody would love to hear that. Anyway, John, we’re really thankful for your knowledge and your insight into what’s to come into 2020, with next year being an election year, we’re definitely going to encounter some surprises along the way. And if you want additional insights from John each week, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to our OFCCP weekend review by visiting directemployers.org/subscribe or you can also send the word compliance and you can text the word “compliance” to 55678 if you’d like it via text. It’s not a sales opportunity for us. It’s truly just information sharing. We don’t do anything with your contact information. I can’t believe how many people read it and I got some content thing that people outside of the United States are reading it.

Candee Chambers:
So it’s kind of interesting. It’s across the world. But this weekly blog is filled with updates on all things related to OFCCP compliance. And we’re actually broadening now sometimes to wage an hour and EOOC and other governmental agencies as well. And it does come out Monday at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time without interruption, except unless or unless it would happen to fall on a specific holiday. But then it’s the next day. And as always, if you’re a member of DirectEmployers, don’t hesitate to reach out with your questions by emailing compliance@directemployers.org or crowd sourcing information from your peers in the DE Connect community by visiting connect.directemployers.org

Thank you again for tuning in to another episode of the DE Talk podcast. With so many great topics to cover, be sure to follow DirectEmployers on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and remember to subscribe, rate, and review the DE Talk podcast to be sure that you’re the first to receive notifications of new episodes available each month. Thanks again for listening and we look to have you join us in the future. Thank you.