OSHA Begins ‘Weighted’ Inspections

Effective Oct. 1, OSHA will begin using a new method to measure how many inspections are conducted annually – the “enforcement weighting system” allowing the agency to conduct more health and process-safety management inspections.

Instead of only counting individual inspections, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) also will break down each inspection into “enforcement units.” Complicated inspections, such as those involving multi-week process safety-management checks at oil refineries or measuring chemical exposure, will have higher enforcement-unit counts than construction-site inspections that take a couple of hours.

The change will force inspectors and their supervisors to take on complicated inspections because they won't have to worry about whether they are meeting goals for individual inspections.

Enforcement unit counts also will be assigned to telephone inquiries made by area office staff when responding to severe injury reports sent to OSHA because of the employee-reporting requirement that began at the start of the year.

OSHA mandated that it must be notified of any amputation, eye loss or worker hospitalization. Currently, phone inquiries prompted by those notifications aren't calculated into inspection counts.

OSHA has spent the past two years looking at how long it took to conduct different types of inspections and breaking down the visits into inspection units. A workgroup selected from national and field staff calculated how long it takes to conduct different types of inspections and assigned them a comparable number of enforcement units.

If you’re concerned about OSHA inspections, or have questions about specific areas of compliance, contact TRSA’s Bill Mann at bmann@trsa.org. For additional information on what to expect from an OSHA inspection, TRSA’s training DVD Managing OSHA Inspections can be extremely helpful. Click here for more information on this resource.