Our clients are increasingly running into the same problem: it’s getting harder to see what’s happening inside the workforces of America’s public companies. Companies are publishing less quantitative workforce data. Some standardized sources have disappeared or become less accessible, while … Read More
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The Quiet Withdrawal
Merck has published a sustainability report every year for 13 years. Its website still states that the company was among the first in the U.S. to disclose its EEO-1 data and that it continues to do so annually. The report … Read More
The Fight Over EEO-1 Isn’t Really About Paperwork
The public comment period on the EEOC’s proposal to eliminate EEO-1 reporting closed on August 24. The docket contains 2,580 comments. The overwhelming majority oppose rescission. That headline number isn’t worth much on its own: more than 1,800 submissions came through three … Read More
A First Look at Our 2026 Human Capital Reporting Trends Report + Data Pack
Two Companies, One Day, Two Very Different Results Merck published its annual sustainability report this week. The company’s website still states that Merck was among the first U.S. companies to disclose Equal Employment Opportunity data and that it will “continue to do so annually.” … Read More
The Dataset That Built PeopleReturn
On July 21, the EEOC voted 2-1 to publish a proposed rule rescinding the EEO-1 report, along with the EEO-2 through EEO-6 collections and the recordkeeping requirements attached to them. The proposal now sits in a 30-day comment period that … Read More
The Great Human Capital Retreat
There’s a particular kind of corporate behavior where a company spends three years telling you how much it cares about something, builds a dedicated page on its website to prove it, hires people to measure it — and then, quietly, … Read More
The Retreat in Workforce Transparency and the End of an Investing Anomaly
Workforce disclosure is retreating faster than most investors realize, while one of the best-known human capital investment signals appears to have been largely arbitraged away. The common thread is that workforce data still matters — but extracting useful signal from … Read More
“Lower-Value Human Capital,” Falling Meta Morale, and the Transparency Pullback
The Workforce Transparency Boom Is Fading For nearly 60 years, the federal government has collected workforce demographic data from tens of thousands of American employers through the EEO-1 reporting system. That system may now be ending. On May 14, the … Read More
PayPal’s DEI Settlement, JPMorgan’s Governance Fight, and the Great Corporate Relabeling
Everything Is DEI Now The Justice Department announced a settlement this week with PayPal over its 2020 Economic Opportunity Fund, which invested in Black and minority-owned businesses. Under the settlement, PayPal will replace the program with a new initiative focused on veterans, … Read More
Disclosure Is Collapsing, Synchrony Is Winning Without RTO, and the EEOC Changes the Rules Again
Proxy Season Is Mostly Over. Meeting Season Isn’t. We’re effectively at the end of proxy reporting season. PeopleReturn has now processed nearly 2,400 Russell 3000 proxy statements filed in 2026, and the filing rush is largely behind us. But the … Read More