Many employers with more than 10 employees have always been required by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to keep injury and illness records. However, they were not required to submit those records to OSHA, unless OSHA sent them an annual survey form. Besides OSHA’s annual survey, employers only had to produce those records in the event of an inspection, and they had to post the annual summary for workers to view.
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But on May 11, the game changed. OSHA will now require many employers to electronically submit their injury and illness logs to OSHA, beginning in January 2017. In addition, OSHA intends to make those records publicly available—rather like EPA’s toxics release inventory (TRI) program, that makes some companies’ hazardous chemical inventories and safety records available to anyone with a computer.
Here’s how the changes could affect your company.
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From 1997 to 2012, OSHA collected establishment-specific injury and illness data through the OSHA Data Initiative (ODI). Through the ODI, OSHA requested injury and illness data from approximately 80,000 large workplaces (with 20 or more employees) in selected industries each year, and employers had the option to submit electronic or paper records. The ODI collected only the aggregate data from the 300A annual summary form, and employers were not required to submit the data electronically. OSHA used the information obtained through the ODI to identify and target the most hazardous worksites.
The new rule replaces the ODI with a requirement that certain employers automatically submit information from their Forms 300, 300A, and/or 301 to OSHA. Specifically:
- Establishments with 250 or more employees that are required to keep injury and illness records under Part 1904 must electronically submit information from their Part 1904 recordkeeping forms (Forms 300, 300A, and 301) to OSHA each year.
- Establishments with 20 or more employees but fewer than 250 employees, in certain designated industries, must electronically submit information from their Part 1904 annual summary (Form 300A) to OSHA each year.
- Establishments that are notified by OSHA that they are required to electronically submit information from Part 1904 recordkeeping forms to OSHA in a given year must do so.
The electronic submission requirement was debated throughout the rulemaking process; the new rule is one of the first federal rules to lack a paper submission option. Ultimately, OSHA determined that most larger employers—who are most likely to be affected by the rule—are already collecting their data electronically and would not find electronic submissions burdensome.
As to how the information must be submitted, OSHA is still working that out. The Agency has promised to take into consideration the commercial systems already in use by the employer for injury/illness recordkeeping. OSHA’s present intention is to provide a mechanism and protocol for employers to transmit their data electronically instead of completing online forms. For example, OSHA suggests that the system could allow employers to securely transfer encrypted data over the Web in an acceptable data file format (for example, Microsoft® Excel®, XML, or Comma Separated Value (CSV)) for validation and import into the electronic reporting system. OSHA intends to provide users with easy-to-follow guidance addressing required data elements (a data dictionary); format and other technical considerations; and steps involved in validation, transfer, and confirmation. Routines will be programmed to automate as much of the process as possible with prompts for manual review as needed.
Tomorrow we’ll look at the sort of information OSHA intends to collect and make available to the public.