The enforcement date for NYC Local Law 144 has been pushed back to 5 July 2023, and the city has held a second public hearing on the proposed rules. Auditors must be independent third parties, and there is support for widening the scope of audits beyond the bias risk vertical. There are concerns that the definitions of AEDTs in the updated rules are too narrow, potentially allowing bad-faith actors to argue that they are not within the scope of the legislation. A third version of the rules may be released before the law goes into effect.

New York City passed Local Law 144 in November 2021 to mandate bias audits of automated employment decision tools (AEDTs) used in candidate screening and promotion. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) proposed metrics to calculate impact ratios for regression systems, but they have limitations, such as being fooled by unexpected distributions and data tweaking. The article suggests using different metrics that consider fairness over the whole distribution, tests to compare different distributions, or metrics that compare the ranking of candidates rather than the score itself. Holistic AI offers an open-source library of metrics for both binary and regression systems and bias mitigation strategies.

New York City has passed a new law called Local Law 144 requiring employers and employment agencies to commission independent, impartial bias audits of automated employment decision tools (AEDTs) being used when evaluating candidates for employment or employees for promotion. The bias audits will be based on impact ratios using the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's four-fifths rule to calculate whether a hiring procedure results in adverse or disparate impact. However, the rule can provide false positives when sample sizes are small, and the NYC legislation doesn't provide guidance on this issue. The enforcement date of Local Law 144 has been delayed to July 5, 2023, providing employers, employment agencies, and vendors more time to collect additional data and make the analysis more robust.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has published a Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP) for the 2023-2027 fiscal years, which prioritizes the regulation of AI and automated employment tools to prevent discrimination against protected groups. The EEOC aims to ensure that these tools do not disproportionately impact protected subgroups, and has launched initiatives to examine the impact of AI on employment decisions. The EEOC recently sued iTutorGroup for age discrimination due to their use of software to reject older applicants, highlighting the importance of regulation in preventing AI-related discrimination in employment.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) came into effect on 1 November 2022 and focuses on regulating fair competition and consumer choice in the digital economy. The legislation defines gatekeepers as providers of core platform services and imposes specific obligations, including an independent audit on companies designated as gatekeepers. The DMA will be enforced from February/March 2024 and failure to comply could result in fines of up to 10% of the company’s total worldwide annual turnover. The DMA, in combination with the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the EU AI Act, is set to make digital technologies safer for users and companies will struggle to find loopholes to avoid doing their due diligence. The DMA is anticipated to set a global precedent, and regulation like this will soon mean that AI around the world is deployed more transparently and with greater accountability.