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The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission won nearly $500 million for victims of discrimination in the workplace in fiscal year 2017 and reduced its inventory of unresolved discrimination charges to its lowest level in a decade, the agency said in a release on their website.

The EEOC secured approximately $484 million, including $355.6 million in monetary relief for those who work in the private sector and state and local government workplaces through mediation, conciliation and other administrative enforcement and $42.4 million in monetary relief for charging parties through litigation. The EEOC also secured $86 million in monetary relief for federal employees and applicants.

They resolved 99,109 charges and reduced the charge workload by 16.2 percent to 61,621, the lowest level of inventory in 10 years.

“The pending inventory of private sector charges (the backlog) has been a longstanding issue for the EEOC and the public it serves,” said EEOC Acting Chair Victoria A. Lipnic.  “Early in the calendar year, we made addressing the backlog a priority. A primary point of this effort was to share strategies among our offices that have been particularly effective in dealing with the pending inventory, while ensuring we are capturing charges with merit. I thank EEOC’s employees for their work and congratulate them on this progress.”

Additionally, the EEOC filed 184 merits lawsuits in FY 2017, including 124 suits on behalf of individuals, 30 non-systemic suits with multiple victims, and 30 systemic suits. This is more than double the number of suits filed in fiscal year 2016.

These accomplishments will be detailed in the EEOC’s fiscal year 2017 Performance and Accountability Report that will be posted on the agency’s web site on November 15, 2017.

Comprehensive enforcement and litigation statistics for fiscal year 2017 will be available on the agency’s website in January 2018.