With all the rules and regulations with which a business needs to comply, an often overlooked area is workplace safety compliance and, specifically, the implications of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration or OSHA. On top of avoiding workers compensation and worker-related frictional costs (production loss/worker distraction, training costs/replacement worker, loss of skill/efficiency – slowed production, administrative time, etc.) compliance can help avoid the penalties that OSHA can impose.
On November 2, 2015, President Obama signed into law the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 (H.R. 1314). Buried within the Act, in a section entitled the “Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015,” are provisions requiring OSHA to increase the limits on penalties that the agency can assess through its enforcement activities. These increases will go into effect sometime within the next nine months and will mark the first time in 25 years that OSHA has increased its penalty limits. That law increased OSHA’s authorized penalties from $1,000 to $7,000 for Serious and Other-than-Serious violations and from $10,000 to $70,000 for Willful and Repeat violations. There is a more comprehensive write up on this that can be found on the Lexology website.
Managing Human Capital Risks is a key aspect of any risk management program and one which should be considered from many viewpoints. Worker injury and costs associated with dealing with it, are only one aspect of the Total Cost of Risk (TCoR) for a company and the perspective that ALS takes includes all areas that can impact the risk and cost of risk for a company https://thealsgroup.com/services/human-capital-practice/ . If you would like to discuss safety or other Human Capital Risks in more detail please do not hesitate to contact me.
About the Author
Albert Sica is the Managing Principal of The ALS Group. You can read more about Al or contact him here. Click here to request more information about The ALS Group.
