NYC Local Law 144: the Two Disclosure Duties

An employer that commissioned a bias audit and never posted it is in breach. So is one that posted it and never told a single candidate. The two duties are independent and both are enforced per day.

Two duties, not one

Local Law 144 splits disclosure between two sections of the New York City Administrative Code. Section 20-871 carries the audit requirement and the duty to make a summary of the results publicly available. Section 20-872 carries the notice duties owed to individual candidates and employees who reside in the city. They have different audiences, different content, different timing, and separate penalty exposure.

The pattern that produces most non-compliance is organisational rather than legal: the audit is procured by legal or by people analytics, and the candidate notice has to be built into an applicant tracking system by whoever owns recruiting operations. If those two conversations never meet, exactly half the law gets implemented. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection’s page for the law is at nyc.gov.

The public summary of results

The summary must be made publicly available on the employment section of the employer’s or employment agency’s website, and it must remain there for at least six months after the tool was last used for an employment decision. It must include the date of the most recent bias audit and the summary of results, and separately the distribution date of the tool.

“Publicly available” carries more weight than it looks. The rules contemplate an active hyperlink on the careers page, clearly identified, rather than a document reachable only if you already know the URL. A summary behind a login, inside a candidate portal, or in a PDF that is not linked from anywhere is not publicly available in the sense the section uses. The content itself — selection or scoring rates, impact ratios, categories, unknown-category counts, data source and any excluded categories — is set out in the bias audit page.

The six-month tail is easy to miss. Retiring a tool does not let you take the summary down; the obligation to keep it up outlives the use it documents. An employer that switched vendors in January and cleaned up its careers page in February has created a violation out of a housekeeping decision.

The ten-business-day candidate notice

Section 20-872 requires notice to each candidate for employment and each employee being considered for promotion who resides in New York City, at least ten business days before the tool is used. Three things must be disclosed:

• That an automated employment decision tool will be used in connection with the assessment or evaluation.
• The job qualifications and characteristics that the tool will use in the assessment.
• The type of data collected for the tool, its source, and the employer’s data retention policy — which may be provided by posting on the website with a link in the notice, and which must be provided within thirty days of a written request if it is not posted.

Ten business days is long. For a role that receives applications continuously, the only workable design is a notice at the point of application rather than a notice sent when screening begins — which is why the rules permit the notice to appear in the job posting itself, or on the careers page, as well as by email or mail.

The second element is the one most notices fail. “We use AI in hiring” does not state the job qualifications and characteristics the tool assesses. Naming them — years of relevant experience, presence of a required certification, similarity of prior titles to the role — requires the employer to know what the model actually uses, and for a bought tool that means asking the vendor a question they may not want to answer in writing. That is a useful forcing function, and it is probably deliberate.

The third element imports a data-retention statement into a hiring notice, which most employers do not otherwise publish. It has to say what is collected, where it came from — application form, resume parsing, video recording, third-party assessment vendor — and how long it is kept.

The alternative process request

The notice must also include instructions for how an individual may request an alternative selection process or a reasonable accommodation under other laws. This is narrower than it first reads. Local Law 144 does not create a right to opt out of AEDT screening: it requires you to tell people how to ask. Whether the request must be granted is governed by other law — principally disability accommodation obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the New York City and State Human Rights Laws — and not by this section.

That distinction is worth stating precisely, because it is commonly reported as an opt-out right. It is not one. It is a signposting duty attached to rights that exist elsewhere, and an employer that receives such a request is answering it under accommodation law rather than under Local Law 144.

Penalties, and how they accumulate

Penalties are civil and are recovered by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection: $500 for a first violation and for each additional violation occurring on the same day, and between $500 and $1,500 for each subsequent violation. Two multipliers matter more than the headline figures. Each day on which an AEDT is used in violation is a separate violation. And a failure to provide either required notice is itself a separate violation from unlawful use.

A concrete consequence: an employer using a screening tool for a quarter without a current audit and without candidate notices is not facing one $500 penalty. It is facing a count-per-day exposure on two independent grounds. The law is complaint-driven and enforcement to date has been light, but the structure is designed so that a sustained lapse is not cheap once it is noticed.

For the broader American picture, the neighbouring duties differ in shape rather than degree: New Jersey’s guidance and disclosure expectations approach the same problem through existing anti-discrimination law, and Illinois HB 3773 skips disclosure almost entirely in favour of making the discriminatory effect actionable. Complying with Local Law 144 satisfies neither.