Current administrative policy directing OSHA Area Offices to issue repeat violations to certain employers that have been cited for substantially similar conditions within a prior three year period at any of their establishments nationally, may be impractical to implement or potentially unfair.Chapter IV of OSHA's Field Operations Manual establishes that repeat violations should be issued to an employer whenever it can be demonstrated that an identical standard or substantially similar different standard was violated. In the past, prior substantially similar general industry violations within the same facility, or construction site violations within the same jurisdiction of the citing Area Office, could be used to support a repeat violation. This approach was later amended to expand the geographical limitations to substantially similar violations at any establishment controlled by the employer nationally. The policy states that Area Directors "shall" obtain a national inspection history in cases where violations are classified as high gravity serious and are "encouraged" to obtain the national inspection history where violations are less than high gravity serious. While this later policy may be touted as a powerful deterrent, its implementation is severely limited by current inadequate OSHA data collection.
OSHA enforcement and inspection records maintained by the Office of Management Data Systems, like any database, is only as good as the information it contains. When attempting to query the database for an employers national inspection history, certain obstacles are encountered. First, extensive experience with this database reveals that establishment names frequently contain typographical errors or misspellings. One simple example might be the incorrect spelling of Procter & Gamble as "Proctor & Gamble."
Second, OSHA uses inconsistent naming conventions. In the example above, Procter & Gamble may also be entered as "Procter and Gamble", "Procter and Gamble, Incorporated", "Procter and Gamble Company", or simply "P and G." Also, division names may precede or antecede the corporate name or, the corporate name may be omitted entirely.
Third, six of the 25 so-called 18(b) state plan states (AK, CA, HI, MI, OR, WA) have occupational safety and health standards that use statutory numbering different from the Code of Federal Regulations used by federal OSHA. For example, say a company has one plant located in an 18(b) state plan state and another plant located in a federal plan state, each with a similar hazard communication type violation. Hazard communication violations would be codified as 29 CFR 1910.1200 under the federal plan, and codified as something completely different under the 18(b) state plan regulation. Both violations cannot, by computer data matching, be directly compared to each other since completely different numbering systems are used. Only laborious research into the state-specific statutes and comparison of their regulatory text and legislative intent with those federal standards judged as substantially similar may produce the required support for a repeat violation.
Fourth and most significantly, OSHA essentially does not obtain employer Duns Number, federal tax identification number, Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) Code, Contractor Establishment Code or any other number that uniquely identifies the company and establishes its parentage. An examination of OSHA inspection data revealed that Duns Numbers were reported in only 8% of inspections performed during the period FY91 through FY93. A subset of inspection records with Duns Numbers were examined by the Dun & Bradstreet Corporation and found to contain significant errors.
Given the four limitations identified above, it is apparent that a rapid and automated means of generating an employers national inspection history is not currently possible. The only way for OSHA to overcome these limitations is to perform tedious manual querying of the database coupled with extensive library research to trace corporate lineage - something it is loath to do given budgetary and staffing constraints. The sad truth is, multi-subsidiery or multi-site employers whose monikers do not contain the same corporate name may be less likely to receive repeat violations. In the same stroke, those establishments with common corporate names may be easier targets.
The obvious solution to this inequity is twofold. First, compliance officers should be directed to obtain tax ID or Duns Numbers for every inspected establishment and verify its accuracy. Second, 18(b) state plan approval regulations should be amended to require use of the same standard numbering system as federal OSHA.
Copyright 1997 OSHA DATA (tm), Maplewood, NJ.
# # # Back to OSHA DATA Home Page