EEOC Litigation: Fiscal Years 1997 to 2008

By now, surely everyone has heard about the 35% increase in the EEOC's backlog from 2007 to 2008, as well as the 20% increase in claims filed during the same one-year period.  You also know that the EEOC is slated to receive an additional $23 million in funding for Fiscal Year 2010.  


In light of the discussions surrounding the EEOC, I thought it would be interesting to look back at ten years of EEOC litigation statistics.  Litigation statistics for Fiscal Years 1997 through 2008 are available at the EEOC's website, and can be found here.


The following chart shows the number of merits suits filed during the 1997 to 2008 time period by statute:

The number of merits suits filed varied quite a bit from 1997 through 2002.  From 2002 to 2006, there was a slow but steady increase. A strong downward trend is evident from 2006 to 2008.  The majority of merits suits filed during this time period were Title VII claims.  ADEA claims held fairly steady at 13% to 14% of total merits suits filed, as did suits filed under multiple statutes at 3% to 5%.  ADA claims declined from 28% of the total in 1997 to 13% of the total in 2008, and Equal Pay claims peaked in 2001 and then sharply fell off.    


These same patterns are observed in merits suits resolved:

The majority of merits suits resolved were Title VII suits.  ADA merits suits resolved fell from a high of 23% in 1997 to 14% in 2008.  Equal Pay Act merits suits resolved rose to a high of 4.7% in 2001, and then declined to less than 1% by 2008.


The picture is less consistent when one examines the monetary relief by statute per year:

The total monetary relief peaked in 2004, at $168.8 million.  Monetary relief for Title VII claims comprised the majority of relief; this is not surprising, given that the majority of merits suits filed and resolved were Title VII claims.  What is surprising, however, is the relief associated with ADEA claims.  In 1999, relief associated with ADEA claims was 43.4% of all relief, while ADEA merits suits filed and merits suits resolved were 10.7% and 15.9% of the totals, respectively.  Similarly, in 2003 relief associated with ADEA claims was 39.4% of all relief, while ADEA merits suits filed and merits suits resolved were 7.4% and 10.0% of the totals, respectively.


It is not clear from the EEOC's data set whether the monetary relief for a given fiscal year is associated with merits suits filed or resolved during that fiscal year, or from previous fiscal years.  Assuming that the monetary relief for a given year is directly attributable to the merits suits filed in that year, we see the following average relief per merits suit filed:

Under this assumption, the average monetary relief per ADEA merits suit filed in 2003  was $2.1 million per suit filed (total monetary relief for ADEA merits suits filed of $57.8 million divided by 27 ADEA merits suits filed in 2003).  


My guess is that the monetary relief for a given fiscal year is just that- the money recovered during the year from suits filed and resolved in previous years.  Even if the monetary relief for a given year is associated with suits from previous years, monetary relief associated with ADEA claims is still disproportionately high relative to the number of merits suits filed.