On January 1, 2015, OSHA rolled out its Severe Injury Reporting Program, requiring all employers to report to OSHA within 24 hours any work-related amputations, inpatient hospitalizations, or loss of an eye.  The long standing requirement to report work-related fatalities to OSHA within 8 hours also remains in place.

According to a report issued by OSHA on January 17, 2016 evaluating the impact of the new reporting requirements, before the requirements were established, compliance officers were often dispatched to inspect a fatality in the workplace, only to discover a history of serious injuries had taken place there in the past, unbeknownst to OSHA.  The new reporting requirements were intended to enable the agency to better target enforcement efforts and engage more high-hazard employers in identifying and eliminating serious hazards.  “In case after case, the prompt reporting of worker injuries has created opportunities for us to work with employers we wouldn’t have had contact with otherwise,” said Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health David Michaels, who authored the report.  “The result is safer workplaces for thousands of workers.”

Making a severe injury or fatality report to OSHA does not necessarily result in a visit from compliance officers.  Rather, in 62% of the over 10,000 reports OSHA received this year, employers were instructed to investigate the incident themselves and produce to the agency a Rapid Response Investigation report in which the employer explains the root cause(s) of the incident that resulted in the severe injury and what the employer has done or plans to do to address the hazard(s) it has discovered.  OSHA intends to continue this practice, as it has proven effective, and is an efficient use of OSHA’s limited resources.

Although 10,000 severe injury reports in the first year (translating into about 30 fatalities or serious injuries per week) may seem like a large number, OSHA says it strongly believes that a substantial number of injuries that should have been reported were not.  The agency reached this conclusion by looking at a number of different factors including the number of injury claims submitted to state workers’ compensation programs, which indicated that employers may be underreporting to OSHA at a rate of over 50%.

Most of the reports that OSHA received this year were from large employers so OSHA believes the underreporting is caused by lack of awareness of the rule among small and mid-sized employers.  The agency intends to address this issue with a major outreach campaign this year which will be accomplished through efforts with insurers, first responders, and business organizations, among others.

There is also a concern that some employers are well aware of the rule but perceive the cost of not reporting as too low to be concerned about it.  OSHA warns in its report that with the new reporting requirements now in their second year, employers who have intentionally failed to report are far more likely to receive citations carrying penalties of up to $7,000 for failure to report, and those penalties will increase by approximately 80% when OSHA’s penalties are adjusted later this year.