Reporting Requirements, Compliance Costs & the Business Case for Safety
Our team at MSS provides OSHA-aligned machine safety and risk assessment services. However, we are NOT affiliated with OSHA and do not process OSHA complaints. If you need to report a safety or health complaint, contact OSHA directly:
Hotline: 1-800-321-OSHA (6742)
Online: osha.gov/workers/file-complaint
State & Regional Offices: osha.gov/contactus/bystate
Every workplace injury sets off a chain reaction. Employers must first determine whether the injury meets OSHA’s threshold for mandatory recordkeeping. From there, any underlying violations, including failure to provide proper personal protective equipment, may result in citations that carry significant per-employee financial penalties. When you add up the full direct and indirect costs of an injury, the impact on a business’s bottom line is almost always higher than expected.
Understanding all three dimensions, what must be recorded, what violations cost, and what injuries truly cost, is the foundation of a proactive approach to workplace safety.
OSHA’s recordkeeping rules require covered employers to log work-related injuries and illnesses that meet specific criteria. A recordable injury or illness includes:
Employers with 250 or more employees are required to electronically submit data from OSHA Form 300A (Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses). Following a 2019 Final Rule, the prior requirement to also electronically submit Forms 300 and 301 was removed for these establishments. All three forms must still be kept and maintained for five years. For full details, visit osha.gov/recordkeeping.
OSHA’s clarification that PPE violations are cited on a per-employee basis, rather than per incident, has a direct and often underestimated impact on citation costs.
The exposure scales quickly: one affected employee results in one citation; twenty affected employees result in twenty citations. OSHA may also issue additional citations where an employer has failed to document proper training alongside the provision of PPE itself.
For many employers, this makes PPE compliance one of the highest-leverage areas to address, both to protect workers and to limit regulatory liability. For questions about interpreting OSHA’s PPE standards or auditing your current compliance posture, contact Machine Safety Specialists.
Recordkeeping obligations and citation exposure are only part of the picture. The full financial cost of a workplace injury includes indirect costs such as lost productivity, replacement worker training, administrative burden, and the impact on workforce morale. These consistently exceed what most employers anticipate.
To help businesses quantify this impact, OSHA developed the Safety Pays Estimator, a confidential tool that calculates the direct and indirect costs of a workplace injury based on injury type and company profit margin. It also calculates the additional revenue a business would need to generate to offset those losses.
As OSHA describes it, the tool “helps estimate cost gains realized through the prevention of occupational injuries and illness claims” and can help businesses predict costs and the sales volume needed to compensate for losses.
Try the Safety Pays Estimator: osha.gov/dcsp/smallbusiness/safetypays/estimator.html
Your local OSHA On-site Consultation Office can also provide guidance on developing and implementing a safety and health management system designed to prevent injuries before they occur.
Injuries that meet OSHA’s recordable threshold generate reporting obligations, expose employers to per-employee citation risk for any contributing violations, and carry financial costs that are greater than most anticipate. Addressing safety proactively, through risk assessments, proper safeguarding, and rigorous PPE compliance, reduces exposure across all three areas simultaneously.
Machine Safety Specialists works with employers to identify hazards before they become injuries, build and document compliant safeguarding programs, and reduce citation risk. Contact us today to learn how we can help reduce your risk and your costs.
MSS is standing by to solve your machine safety needs. Contact us today – we can be there tomorrow!
