Inspectors for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will be cracking down on employers who failed to electronically file their 300A, 300 Log and 301 injury reports, according to an article on EHS Today.
Because of confusion over implementation of the rule, OSHA had said that for 2017, affected employers only needed to file their 2016 Form 300A. The deadline for filing their 300A forms containing 2016 data was then set for July 1, 2017. The deadline was eventually later postponed to Dec. 15 and then to Dec. 30.
During the lead-up to the Dec. 30 submission deadline, 60,000 accounts were created on OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application on its website and more than 214,000 of the 300A forms were submitted.
This total fell short of the 350,000 submissions (excluding state plans) that OSHA had expected, the article said.
According to OSHA, a little more than a third of workplaces that were required to respond did not file the reports. As of Jan. 1, OSHA no longer accepted the 2016 data and it’s now too late for those employers who did not do so to submit their 2016 Form 300A.
OSHA has since told its compliance officers to initiate inquiries into whether workplaces had electronically filed their 300A forms for 2016. If the employer has failed to file, OSHA will issue an other-than-serious citation. The maximum penalty for each other-than-serious violation can be as high as $12,934.
To read more about the rules, click here for the full article.