by jbs101409 e3 — October 21, 2009—The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is initiating a national emphasis program on recordkeeping to assess the accuracy of injury and illness data recorded by employers.
The recordkeeping program involves inspecting occupational injury and illness records prepared by businesses and appropriately enforcing regulatory requirements when employers are found to be under-recording injuries and illnesses.
“Accurate and honest recordkeeping is vitally important to workers’ health and safety,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA Jordan Barab. “This information is not only used by OSHA to determine which workplaces to inspect, but it is an important tool employers and workers can use to identify health and safety problems in their workplaces.”
The inspections include a records review, employee interviews, and a limited safety and health inspection of the workplace. The program will focus on selected industries with high injury and illness rates.
The program will help OSHA work cooperatively with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which issued a study on the accuracy of employer injury and illness records at the request of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions and the House Committee on Education and Labor.
The program also complements the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) efforts to investigate factors accounting for differences between the number of workplace injuries and illnesses estimated by BLS and those estimated by other data sources.
