The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission uses its Integrated Mission System (IMS) to track employment discrimination complaints and investigations. As a 2020 report commissioned by the EEOC Office of Inspector General explains:
IMS is the key database used to track, assign and document key actions taken during a case’s full lifecycle. Accordingly, IMS maintains information on federal complaint hearings records. Information stored includes the complainant’s name, address and demographics; the agency’s name and address; and particular details of the complaint (such as number of days in certain stages, if IMS action code is available); and activities related to the complaint, such as the number of days at each stage of the appeals process as confirmed by Appeals Action codes.
The agency’s Privacy Impact Assessment for IMS generally describes the system’s various components and types of data collected, but lacks specific information about how the data are recorded, the structure of the database, and many other essential details.
Our FOIA request 📄 seeks all records that document IMS, such as database diagrams and user guides, for the purpose of better understanding the system and also to aid in the construction of efficient FOIA requests for particular slices of non-exempt database material in the future.