Executive Summary: On July 27, 2018, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a news release stating that it has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to “better protect personally identifiable information or data that could be re-identified with a particular individual by removing provisions of the ‘Improve Tracking of Workplace Injuries and Illnesses’ rule. OSHA believes this proposal maintains safety and health protections for workers, protects privacy and reduces the burdens of complying with the current rule.”
Pursuant to OSHA regulations, employers must record injury and illness data and provide additional information about those records in OSHA Forms 300 and 301. OSHA also requires businesses to create an annual summary of the data in OSHA Form 300A. Businesses with 250 or more workers were required to submit these forms electronically to OSHA with 2017 information by July 1, 2018. The proposed rule eliminates the requirement to electronically submit information from OSHA Forms 300 and 301. The businesses would be required only to electronically submit information from Form 300A.
OSHA is not accepting Form 300 or 301 data and will not enforce the deadlines for those two forms without further notice while the rulemaking is underway.
If you have any questions regarding this development or other workplace safety issues, please feel free to contact Rick Warren, who is a partner in our Atlanta office at rwarren@fordharrison.com, or the FordHarrison attorney with whom you usually work.