A Monday Senate report found that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lost millions in litigation missteps.
The report from the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) stated that the EEOC, “is pursuing many questionable cases through sometimes overly aggressive means — and, as a result, has suffered significant court losses that are embarrassing to the agency and costly to taxpayers.”
The EEOC handles workplace discrimination cases.
“Courts have found EEOC’s litigation tactics to be so egregious they have ordered EEOC to pay defendants’ attorney’s fees in ten cases since 2011,” the report continued.
The report detailed, “The courts have criticized EEOC for misuse of its authority, poor expert analysis, and pursuit of novel cases unsupported by law. Several courts have openly criticized EEOC for its failure to satisfy pre-litigation requirements, such as attempting to resolve discrimination disputes out of court.”
Additionally, the report found that in March of 2014, the EEOC reported almost 71,000 unresolved complaints of discrimination from individuals and the agency’s litigation has recovered nearly $200 million less for victims than under the previous administration over the same amount of time.
The report also alleges that the EEOC is not at all transparent. This includes the agency ignoring calls from current commissioners and Congress to allow public review of significant and controversial guidance prior to adoption and the Office of General Counsel failure to issue its standard annual report in recent years. The agency is also being sued for violating a Freedom of Information Act request.
David Lopez is general counsel of the EEOC.
In response to these allegations, a spokeswoman for the EEOC told The Daily Caller News Foundation, “We are still reviewing the report and do not have detailed comments to provide at this time.”
“However, as General Counsel Lopez stated during his testimony before the Committee, the EEOC’s litigation program has been highly successful – resolving more than 90 percent of the cases agency litigators file — including landmark cases involving disability, pregnancy, age and religion,” the spokeswoman continued.
“General Counsel Lopez stated unequivocally that any award of fees or sanctions against the agency is unacceptable” she stated.
“This is why he developed and implemented systems and procedures for attorneys across the EEOC to learn from judicial decisions, including those instances mentioned in the report where cases filed by predecessors had sanctions and fees” the spokeswoman went on to explain.
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