Responding to an EEOC Charge

A charge of discrimination is the mandatory first step for most federal employment claims — an employee generally cannot sue under Title VII, the ADA, or the ADEA without filing one, within 180 days of the challenged act (extended to 300 days in states with their own fair-employment agencies, which is most of them). You'll receive a notice of charge, typically through the EEOC's respondent portal, with the allegations and a deadline to respond. It is not a finding, not a lawsuit, and not rare — the EEOC receives tens of thousands of charges a year, and the protected classes guide maps what they allege.

Three moves before any response gets drafted. Preserve: issue a litigation hold covering the charging party's personnel file, emails, chat messages, time and pay records, comparator files, and the decision-makers' communications — auto-deletion that eats relevant messages after notice of a charge is how defensible cases become indefensible. Stabilize: brief the charging party's managers that nothing changes — no transfers, no cold shoulder, no schedule surprises; the retaliation guide explains how post-charge treatment becomes the stronger claim. Assess: have someone outside the decision chain — counsel or HR — review what actually happened against the allegations, honestly, before advocacy begins.

The position statement is your written defense to the agency — and the EEOC shares it with the charging party, who may rebut it. Treat every sentence as future deposition material: state the legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for the decision precisely, because a reason that shifts between the position statement and later testimony is the textbook evidence of pretext. Attach the documents that existed at the time — the reviews, the warnings, the policy — not narratives reconstructed afterward. If the underlying events were handled through a real investigation, this is where it pays; the investigations guide builds that record. Keep confidential comparator data in separately marked attachments the agency can withhold.

The EEOC offers mediation early — free, confidential, non-admissible — and it resolves a large share of charges cheaply; evaluate it on litigation-cost math, not on principle. If investigation proceeds, respond to information requests completely and on time; the agency can subpoena. Outcomes: a dismissal and notice of rights (the charging party has 90 days to sue), a cause finding followed by conciliation (and rarely, an EEOC lawsuit), or a negotiated settlement anywhere along the way. Whatever the outcome, run the postmortem: charges cluster around the same managers, the same missing documentation, the same skipped steps — fixing those is the only free part of the process.