Cal/OSHA Issues Emergency Regulation for Electronic Reporting

On October 18, Cal/OSHA issued a notice of emergency regulation that would require certain employers to electronically submit their summary of recordable work-related injuries and illnesses covering calendar year 2017 to federal OSHA by December 31, 2018.

The original deadline was July of 2018 but circumstances related to state adoption of Federal guidelines and a low percentage of California employers complying with the original deadline caused an emergency regulation to be issued allowing employers in California to submit this data by December 31st.

When legislation was first pushed out by Federal OSHA under the previous administration, the intent was to require employers to start uploading the full OSHA logs and 301 (first report of injury) starting this year. This requirement was pulled back by the current administration and will not be required. Only 300A summary information must be reported this way.

These rules are applicable to each establishment within your company. In other words, you will not submit data for your company as a whole in one entry but for each establishment. An "Establishment" is defined by OSHA’s regulation 1904.46, as:

...a single physical location where business is conducted or where services or industrial operations are performed. For activities where employees do not work at a single physical location, such as construction; transportation; communications, electric, gas, and sanitary services; and similar operations, the establishment is represented by main or branch offices, terminals, stations, etc. that either supervise such activities or are the base from which personnel carry out these activities.

Not all establishments are required to submit this data. Establishments currently partially exempt from record keeping are still partially exempt and will not have to submit data electronically. A list of establishments which are currently partially exempt can be found here.

The regulation states that:

• Establishments with 250 or more employees which are not partially exempt must submit electronically.
• Establishments with 20 to 249 employees and which are included in this list also must report electronically.

The Federal OSHA Incident Tracking Application must be used to submit this data. You can submit directly from this page on the OSHA site.

The reporting deadline for future entries will be March 2nd of the following year. This means that if you are entering your 2017 data on December 31st of 2018 then you will enter data into the system for 2018  just two months later by March 2, 2019.

All employers are still required to report immediately to OSHA when serious injuries or fatalities occur, regardless of partially exempt status. On the OSHA site, visit this reporting page which is applicable to all states and which further explains times frames within which you must report each type of incident.

Please feel free to contact your Woodruff Sawyer account team with questions related to California OSHA Electronic Recordkeeping Requirements.