Today, OFCCP under new Director Jenny Yang published a 2022 Corporate Scheduling Announcement List (CSAL) identifying those establishments of federal contractors and subcontractors that it will schedule for compliance evaluations – more commonly known as “audits” – over the next year or more. Included with the new CSAL is OFCCP’s methodology for selecting contractors for audit.
New for this CSAL is OFCCP’s Directive that contractors may not enjoy a 45-day grace period before the Agency begins to schedule the audits, as has been the case for years. Directive 2022-02 – Effective Compliance Evaluations and Enforcement provides that “OFCCP may begin scheduling contractors upon the publication of the CSAL.” While the apparent intent of the CSAL is to provide advance notice, those who are scheduled for an audit on the heels of this 2022 CSAL may not receive much of a heads up. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether the Agency will immediately begin scheduling audits from the 2022 CSAL, given that it is still working to schedule or complete audits from the 2021 CSALs.
Generally speaking, OFCCP will schedule new audits from the 2022 CSAL as District Offices have capacity to handle them, which means the timing of the receipt of a “scheduling letter” triggering the audit is unpredictable. However, OFCCP will often reach out to the contractor shortly before the sending a scheduling letter to confirm contact information for the company official to whom the scheduling letter will be sent.
Where possible, identified contractors should use the advance notice to ensure that their AAP compliance efforts are in order and that data will be ready to supply to OFCCP.
That is especially true now, given that automatic 30-day extensions of the data submission deadline are a thing of the past. As also included in Directive 2022-02 – Effective Compliance Evaluations and Enforcement, OFCCP will now grant deadline extensions only in “extraordinary circumstances.”