Report 2015-132 Recommendation 12 Responses

Report 2015-132: County Pay Practices: Although the Counties We Visited Have Rules in Place to Ensure Fairness, Data Show That a Gender Wage Gap Still Exists (Release Date: May 2016)

Recommendation #12 To: Orange County

To ensure that they can readily monitor gender-based pay equity complaints and reliably evaluate how often such complaints are filed by its employees, each county should develop tracking mechanisms that allow management to reliably determine how often these complaints occur and whether there are patterns of complaints that pertain to specific county departments or classifications.

6-Month Agency Response

The attached form was developed to specifically track gender-based pay equity complaints as well as allowing better tracking of all other types if discrimination complaints. The form allows the County the capability of tracking each of the fields in the form to produce the require reports at regular intervals, monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. Any existing forms have been removed from access to employees and replaced by the attached. Employees will be required to use the attached form when filing a complaint.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Fully Implemented

Orange County revised its Equal Employment Opportunity discrimination/retaliation complaint form to address our recommendation and track gender-based pay equity complaints. This form now includes 'Gender Discrimination/Sex' as one of the basis for the alleged discrimination and also includes a section to indicate if the discrimination includes 'Pay', 'Promotion' or both 'Pay and Promotion' as a basis for the alleged discrimination.

60-Day Agency Response

The current EEO compliant form will be revised to provide an option for a complainant to make a specific allegation regarding wage/gender discrimination. A tracking system will be designed to track such complaints by position, agency and/or department. We anticipate the revised EEO complaint form will be made available on line to employees in the next 30 days.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

All Recommendations in 2015-132

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.