All public, and all private employers with 50 or more employees are obligated to report. Additionally, private employers with 20 or more employees must report if one of their employees requests it.

The report consists of 2 parts:

Part 1: report on data analysis (including gender balance, salary mapping, part-time including involuntary, temporary employees and parental leave)

Part two: a written statement describing how your company is working to improve workplace equality, inclusion and diversity.

The report must be submitted annually. However some parts of the data collection and analysis is only required to be completed every two years. This includes salary mapping (lønnskartlegging). With Compliance, it’s easy to complete the detailed data reporting annually, which we recommend our customers perform for improved insight and overview.

The report must be published as part of your annual report and/or other publicly available documentation.

Likestillings og diskrinineringsombudet (“LDO” - The Norwegian Equality and Discrimination Ombudsman) provide a guidance and follow-up role for employers. After the legislative preparations, they have a dialogue-oriented approach in the guidance and can make recommendations.

If LDO believe a business has not sufficiently met the reporting requirements, they can lodge complaints with Diskrimineringsnemnda (the Norwegian Anti-discrimination tribunal) . The board will then assess if the business has met the reporting requirement or not. Complaints are a matter of public record, with documents available to the public, both during the complaint process and upon resolution of the complaint. In the final instance, companies can be fined.

While the Compliance tool follows the report standards, producing your report via the tool can’t be considered as making your organisation compliant automatically. It is your company's board of directors who are legally responsible for reporting. They are responsible for ensuring your final report is published and completed in accordance with the legislation.

Equality Check has no legal responsibility for the content of your report or its content, and we cannot guarantee what Diskrimineringsnemnda (the Norwegian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal) may decide in the event of a complaint. However, our tool has been developed in close dialogue with advisers at LDO, and has been reviewed by the Employment Law Department of Thommessen law firm. Our experience is that employers who follow the recommendations in our tool deliver high quality report documentation that meet the reporting requirements.

One of the big challenges with the current legislation is that there are no specific regulations or other supporting texts that clarify how the law must be reported in practice. This creates a lot of questions for employers when trying to interpret the reporting requirements.

Of course, we cannot guarantee how the discrimination board will decide when assessing individual cases for how the regulations have been interpreted. However, when determining our response to such questions, either ones our team identifies, or ones asked to us by our customers, our experts work systematically to develop best practices on how to solve the problem. This process is conducted in combination with relevant expert stakeholders (legal experts, business auditors, the reporting authorities), together with hundreds of hours of consulting on ARP reporting for our customers.