Plans have been dropped for a proposed requirement that public companies disclose the number of contingent workers they use and how much they pay for the temporaries.

The Society for Human Resource Management included the requirement in a proposed standard, known as the "investor metrics standard." SHRM was working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in the hopes of improving the reporting on the value of human capital in financial statements such as 10-Ks.

The American Staffing Association, several publicly traded staffing firms and other businesses opposed the standard over the negative impact on the staffing industry. And the ASA played a key role in preventing the requirement from going into place.

In addition to contingents, the standard would have called for public companies to disclose many types of human resources data such as spend on all employees (including traditionally hired), voluntary turnover, total turnover and other data.

The standard would have caused several difficulties for staffing buyers, according to Stephen Dwyer, general counsel of the ASA, including:

• Reducing workforce flexibility.
• Forcing firms to disclose proprietary staffing practices, trade secrets and confidential information that, at best, would be misleading to investors.
• Increasing the reporting burden on companies.

The investment community was not calling for such a standard, and it was not justified or warranted, Dwyer reported.

SHRM announced on Nov. 29 that it withdrew the investor metrics standard from consideration by ANSI.

Staffing Industry Analysts is a sister company of Workforce Management. Comment below or email editors@workforce.com.

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