In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Adele L. Abrams, Esq., CMSP, Firm President, Law Office of Adele L. Abrams P.C., talks about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandatory reporting requirements.
This clip was taken from a webinar titled “OHS Forecast 2024: Tools to Use for Compliance”. The full session is available for FREE on-demand here.
This webinar was sponsored by Dakota Software, Intelex, and KPA.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Question: What are the OSHA mandatory reporting requirements?
Abrams: If you are the small employers, typically these are the main NAICS codes: anything in construction, utilities, manufacturing, wholesale trade, fishing, forestry, hunting, and agriculture. And then, just to give an example and this is not exhaustive, but the big and heavies: building materials and suppliers, furniture dealers, retail, department stores, lawn and garden centers, and then also transportation and storage, warehousing and logistics have had very high incidence rates in recent years, and then machinery and equipment repair and maintenance. Those were the main ones they were looking at for the mandatory reporting.
I also want to mention, as part of this, the severe injury reporting requirements. Now these are older, this isn’t a new thing, but it is what drives the majority of inspections and reminder: you have eight hours to notify federal OSHA of a fatality, you have 24 hours to notify them of an amputation, an inpatient hospitalization, or the loss of an eye, and only one of those things happens within 24 hours of the triggering event.
When COVID first came out under OSHA enforcement, they were saying, “Yes, report them,” then the Trump Administration changed that to say, “No, don’t report any OSHA cases on your logs” or rather, “Call us about the hospitalizations or the deaths because we only want to know if it occurred within 24 hours of exposure.” And because they couldn’t prove that anybody was getting to the point of hospitalization within 24 hours of when the microbe virus went up your nose, they just said, “None of the cases were reportable now” so that was a change under the Trump Administration. It’s where things stand.