OSHA won’t routinely request self-audits
December 1, 1999 4 minutes read
OSHA won’t routinely request self-audits
Agency hopes to encourage more reviews
In a move intended to alleviate some fears among employers, federal safety officials recently announced that they will not routinely request employers’ voluntary self-audits of workplace safety and health conditions in making inspections. In the past, inspectors may have misused the self-audits according to a high-ranking federal official.
Voluntary self-audits are conducted by the employer or the occupational health professional as a way to discover safety and health deficiencies. The Occupational Safety and Health Administra-tion has long encouraged self-audits, and some federal safety standards even require the employer to conduct self-audits periodically. While almost no one has disputed that the self-audits are productive, many employers have complained that the audits can be used against them when an OSHA inspector arrives, says Ross Eisenbrey, JD, director of policy for OSHA.
Some abuse may have occurred, officials say
"The recent changes were prompted by the concerns of employers — concerns that they’ve had for a number of years," he tells Occupational Health Management. "OSHA always has taken the position that employers don’t have anything to fear if they responded appropriately to what was found in the audit, but, nevertheless, there has been the perception that bad things can happen to you if do a self-audit."
Employers and trade organizations had mounted a campaign against the abuse of self-audits in the past few years, Eisenbrey says. Much of the debate centered on whether the OSHA inspectors used the self-audits in a fair and reasonable way, or whether they used them as an easily accessible weapon against the employer. Eisenbrey says that argument was never settled, but OSHA did get the message that employers fear how inspectors will use the self-audits.
"I don’t think anyone has come forward with a case in which there was real dispute about how the employer should have been treated, as a result of what was in the self-audit," he says. "There have been cases in which they did the audit and didn’t respond to what they found, then two years later, OSHA used that against them because it was evidence that they knew about the problem for a long time and didn’t do anything."
That would be a reasonable use of the self-audit information, he says. But employers feared another practice even more, and the fear may have been justified. Though the allegations were hard to prove, Eisenbrey tells OHM that inspectors may have misused the self-audits as an easy guide for their inspections.
"There has been concern that we have inspectors — very difficult to verify — who would go in and say, Let me have any audit done in the last X years’ as soon as they walked in the door," he says. "Then they would use the audit as the basis for the investigation, following it like a road map to find problems."
That was not the intended use of self-audits during on-site inspections, Eisenbrey says. Employers tended to find the practice "somehow offensive, not sporting, just not fair that employers would do something voluntarily to improve safety and health and have it used against them that way."
The newly announced rules clarify that inspectors are not allowed to use self-audits that way. "We won’t do that anymore," he says.
Intended as proactive means of improvement
In announcing the recent changes Charles Jeffress, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health said, "Voluntary self-audits, when properly conducted, can help employers discover and correct safety and health hazards, reduce penalties, and prevent similar violations in the future. OSHA’s policy statement recognizes the value voluntary self-audits have for employers’ safety and health compliance efforts. At the same time, it also recognizes that access to relevant information is important to OSHA’s inspection and enforcement activities." (See more on changes to self-audits, p. 138.)
The statement published in the Oct. 6, 1999, Federal Register clarifies that OSHA will not routinely request voluntary self-audit reports at the initiation of an inspection. (The Federal Register can be accessed on-line at www.access.gpo.gov/ su_docs/aces/aces140.html.) When an audit identifies a hazardous condition in the workplace and the employer promptly takes corrective action, OSHA will not treat the audit report as evidence of a willful violation. The agency will treat the audit as evidence of good faith, which may entitle the employer to a penalty reduction.
OSHA includes in many of its standards an explicit requirement that employers conduct self-audits to determine their compliance. In addition to these required audits, many employers undertake voluntary self-audits to improve safe and healthful work environments and to ensure compliance with the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The dispute about self-audits concerns those conducted voluntarily.
There is no evidence that a significant number of employers have stopped doing self-audits or that OSHA has discouraged employers from initiating them. Nevertheless, OSHA developed its policy statement to provide general guidance on the circumstances under which OSHA intends to exercise its authority to obtain voluntary self-audit documents during an inspection.
"The self-audits are not off-limits, but we won’t request them without a good reason," Eisenbrey says. "If we do obtain the audits, we will use them for a specific purpose and not just to aid in the overall inspection. If it was a comprehensive self-audit, we will use only the information pertaining to the reason we requested it, not everything in the audit."
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