Occupational Safety and Health

Improvements Needed in OSHA's Monitoring of Federal Agencies' Programs Gao ID: HRD-92-97 August 28, 1992

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) knows little about federal agencies' safety and health programs and their effectiveness in protecting workers from occupational injuries and illnesses. In monitoring the programs, OSHA relies on inspections at specific workplaces, rather than using an approach--as envisioned by its regulations--combining program evaluations, report reviews, and on-site inspections. Although GAO cannot conclude that OSHA's approach means better or worse protection for federal workers, OSHA can improve its monitoring of agency safety and health programs. The information OSHA already receives in agencies' annual reports can help it evaluate program implementation. Also, if OSHA checks for compliance with the program requirements during its inspections as planned and uses inspection results to identify systemic problems, it can better spot the causes of workplace hazards.

GAO found that OSHA: (1) monitors federal agencies' safety and health programs differently from the approach envisioned in its regulations; (2) is not conducting required annual evaluations of the 15 agencies identified as the largest or most hazardous agencies, and it rarely evaluates the 95 or so other agencies, even when their work-related injury and illness rates are high; (3) inspects federal work places but makes limited use of inspection results in assessing agencies' programs; (4) does not require agencies to provide evidence of actions to correct hazardous conditions, inspect agencies for compliance with program requirements, or use inspections to identify and correct programmatic and agency actions to correct identified hazards; and (5) is not required to and does not monitor how well federal agencies implement the Hazard Communication Standard.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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