Illinois’s Equal Pay Registration Certificate (EPRC) portal is experiencing technical issues when employers submit a pay report that categorizes employees as Middle Eastern or North African (MENA).
Illinois requires employers with 100 or more employees in the state to obtain an EPRC, which involves submitting demographic and wage data to the Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL). Employers must recertify every two years. In 2025, IDOL added a MENA category as an option for employers to use when submitting employee demographic data
Employers that have recently attempted to use the MENA race category when trying to recertify their EPRC have received error messages.
CWC reached out to IDOL to determine how employers should proceed. IDOL advised that users experiencing issues submitting MENA data should use the “Some other race alone” category instead of MENA.