The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

III. Access to Certain Records Without a FOIA Request

All agencies make certain types of records available without a FOIA request. For the EEOC, many of these can be found on the EEOC's website, located at http://www.eeoc.gov. These records include the EEOC's National Enforcement Plan, the text of all federal statutes enforced by EEOC, interpretative guidance on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Pay Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and information on how to file a charge of discrimination.

Information concerning the EEOC may also be accessed through the Government Information Locator Service (GILS), which contains an extensive electronic listing of the EEOC's information resources. Each GILS entry describes the information resource and explains how to obtain or access it. EEOC's GILS can be located at the following uniform resource locator address: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/gils/index.html.

The EEOC maintains public reading areas at its Headquarters library at 1801 L. Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20507 and in its District Offices. These reading areas are available to the public by appointment. The following information is available at Headquarters:

  1. Blank EEOC forms relating to the Commission's procedures as they affect the public
  2. EEOC's annual reports to Congress
  3. EEOC's Compliance Manual and Index
  4. Federal Register notices published by the Commission
  5. EEOC Directives, including Internal Orders, Supplements, and Notices
  6. An Equal Employment Decisions loose-leaf service and bound volumes
  7. Commercially unpublished Commission Precedent Decisions and index
  8. Commission budgets submitted to Congress
  9. Commercially published indexes to the Compliance Manual and the Commission Precedent Decisions
  10. Other materials that the Legal Counsel or designee has determined should be publicly available for inspection and copying in the public reading room under the FOIA.

In addition, the following information is available at the EEOC’s District, Field, Area, and Local offices:

  1. Blank EEOC forms relating to the Commission's procedures as they affect the public
  2. EEOC's annual reports to Congress
  3. EEOC's Compliance Manual and Index
  4. Federal Register notices published by the Commission
  5. EEOC Directives, including Internal Orders, Supplements, and Notices
  6. An Equal Employment Decisions loose-leaf service and bound volumes

The EEOC also makes certain information, such as its publications and standard forms, available in paper copy form without requiring a formal FOIA request. Requests for these publications and forms can be made to any EEOC office.

The EEOC discloses information from employment discrimination charge files only to charging parties and/or respondent employers named in the charges pursuant to section 83 of the EEOC Compliance Manual. Requests for disclosure pursuant to section 83 should be addressed to the director of the office where the charge was filed or investigated.

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This page was last modified on May 12, 2006.

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