Injury, illness summaries must be posted as soon as possible

If your company is required to keep the OSHA Form 300 Injury and Illness Log, the summary form needs to be posted now. OSHA is reminding affected employers that the Form 300-A must be certified and posted through April 30.

OSHA requires each covered employer to review his OSHA 300 log for completeness and accuracy and prepare an Annual Summary using the OSHA 300-A or an equivalent form. The summary must be certified for accuracy and completeness and be posted in a common area wherever notices to workers are typically posted by Feb. 1 and remain posted until April 30.

Preparing the summary requires the following four steps:

Reviewing the OSHA 300 log.
Computing and entering the summary information on the form 300-A. This involves totaling the columns on the log; transferring them to the summary form; and entering the calendar year covered, name of the employer, name and address of the establishment, average number of employees on the payroll for the calendar year, and the total hours worked by the covered employees. If there were no recordable cases for the year covered, the summary must still be completed by entering zeros in the total for each column.
Certification by a company executive.
Posting.

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The records provide the base data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual survey of occupational injuries and illnesses. OSHA also uses the information for inspection targeting, performance measurement, standards development, resource allocation, Voluntary Protection Program eligibility, and low-hazard industry exemptions.

Employers, employees and compliance officers can use the information to analyze the safety and health environment at an establishment and to implement safety and health programs.

Recording an injury or illness does not affect entitlement to workers' comp benefits, OSHA says. It also does not prove a violation of an OSHA rule.

Also, the rules or compensability do not have any effect on whether a case needs to be recorded on the OSHA 300 log. "Many cases will be OSHA recordable and compensable under workers' compensation. However, some cases will be compensable but not OSHA recordable, and some cases will be OSHA recordable but not compensable under workers' compensation," the agency says.

Read more at the WorkersComp Forum homepage.

March 19, 2012

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