The agency says repeated reactions sent her to the hospital before the company let her go
A benefits software company fired a worker with a severe onion allergy instead of accommodating it, the EEOC alleges in a new lawsuit.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Paycom Payroll, LLC on June 30 in federal court in Oklahoma, accusing the company of breaking federal disability law in its handling of a benefits coordinator's severe food allergy.
The employee, according to the complaint, had a medically documented anaphylactic allergy to onions - one serious enough that even airborne exposure could threaten her breathing and land her in the hospital. She disclosed it early and often, the filing says: during her April 2024 interview, again at orientation after she started on May 20, 2024, and to her team lead.
Her work made accommodation realistic, the agency argues. She sat at a desk, worked largely on her own, and met clients over Zoom to help move benefits information into the company's software.
Even so, the complaint describes a string of dangerous exposures once she was on the job. Coworkers walked past her cubicle with onion burgers. Food was carried to a breakroom near her. At one point, the company catered a lunch containing onions. Several reactions required emergency medication, the filing says, and one, on June 10, 2024, sent her to the hospital by ambulance.
She asked for help repeatedly. In a May 28, 2024 email, the complaint says, she told human resources she was "deathly allergic to onions." Her doctor later recommended an enclosed office away from food, or permission to work from home.
The EEOC alleges the company turned those recommendations down. Instead, according to the filing, it told her to wear a mask and carry an EpiPen, then relocated her to a room roughly fifteen feet from a breakroom - without alerting the employees who used it to her allergy.
The filing describes the ending in a few steps. On June 18, 2024, the complaint says, an in-house attorney instructed HR to stop discussing accommodations until further guidance came down. The following day, the filing states, the company fired her, telling her the move was for her "health and wellness." It did so, the EEOC alleges, without waiting for additional medical documentation she had offered and without consulting her physician.
The lawsuit brings two claims under the Americans with Disabilities Act: failure to accommodate and discriminatory discharge. The complaint alleges the company acted "with malice or with reckless indifference" to the worker's federally protected rights.
For HR leaders, the allegations track closely to the mechanics of the accommodation process. Under the ADA, the obligation is an ongoing "interactive process" - a genuine effort to find a workable solution - and a first attempt that fails does not end the employer's duty. The complaint points to a pattern the agency flags repeatedly: fixes that kept falling short, a doctor's recommendation left unaddressed, and a termination framed as being in the employee's own interest.
That framing is often where disputes turn. Deciding that a job is unsafe for someone, rather than adjusting the conditions that make it unsafe, can look from the outside like removing the employee instead of the barrier. Documentation of each accommodation attempt, and of why alternatives were or were not tried, tends to be what separates a defensible record from an exposed one.
None of the allegations have not been proven, and no court has ruled.
