Fresno, California – In an about-face, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration is requiring employers to E-File their 300A logs by July 1, even if the employer is covered by a state OHSA plan. On April 30 the agency made the announcement reversing their previous position.
Employers who had at least 20 employees at anytime in 2017 and are covered by OSHA’s injury and illness recordkeeping requirements must upload data from their Forms 300A, “Annual Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses” on Fed OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (ITA). The confusion started with states such as California that are covered under a State OSHA plan, thought that this federal mandate didn’t apply to them. Well, it does after the April 30 Fed-OSHA memo went out. High hazard industries such as agriculture must comply with this mandate.
Datatech recently received this update from the Farm Labor Employers Service. In the update, FELS says, “When Fed-OSHA proposed and finalized this rule, employer organizations expressed serious concern about the regulation, particularly its provision for public disclosure on Fed-OSHA’s website of injury and illness data. Fed-OSHA contends this transparency will encourage employers to be safer; however, the data Fed-OSHA will report on its website will omit key facts such as the circumstances of an injury (was the employee under the influence of drugs or alcohol?) or how many employees the employer has (making it impossible to get a sense of the overall quality of the employer’s safety efforts by making it impossible to gauge the rate of workplace injuries for that employer). In the first quarter of every year in recent years, FELS has published in the FELS Newsletter a reminder to post 300A forms from Feb. 1 through April 30 if the employer had at least 11 employees at any time in the prior year. Now, an agricultural employer must furnish this data to the Fed-OSHA ITA if it employed 20 or more employees at any time in the prior year.”
So as a reminder, agribusinesses with as few as 20 employees at any given time in 2017 must comply in this E-File mandate to report the 300A log for that year.
Datatech serves agribusinesses nationwide and provides farm accounting software which can include the human resource management module to speed up compliance reporting such as the OHSA 300 series logs.