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Employers and workers routinely underreport work-related injuries and illnesses, calling into question the accuracy of nationwide data that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) compiles each year, according to a report released Monday.
The report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the auditing arm of Congress, said many employers did not report workplace injuries and illnesses for fear of increasing their workers' compensation costs or hurting their chances of winning contracts.
The report also said workers did not report job-related injuries because they feared being fired or disciplined and worried their co-workers might lose rewards, such as bonuses or steak dinners, as part of safety-based incentive programs.
"The widespread underreporting so clearly documented in this report is undermining the health and safety of American workers," said Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "If we don't know the full extent of the workplace hazards workers face, we cannot fully address these risks."
In response to the report, which examined OSHA's audits from 2005 to 2007, the safety administration said it would adopt the accountability office's recommendations, among them requiring inspectors to interview employees during all audits to check the accuracy of employer-provided injury data.
The findings do not concur with the experiences
"I find it hard to believe," he said. "The vast majority of our policyholders play by the rules."
Hair said most states assess stiff penalties for failure to report injuries, which are difficult to hide.
"Business owners are much more savvy than that," he said. "They know that's bad business. No one wants the economic loss of penalties costing thousands of dollars or the bad publicity of being a bad player. And injuries are always more expensive when they're not treated immediately."
Any underreporting, Hair suspected, probably involves soft-tissue injuries -- such as a bad back -- in which it is difficult to determine when and where the accident initially occurred.
The GAO said the rate of workplace injuries -- there were 4 million in 2007, including 5,600 fatalities -- has declined fairly steadily since 1992. OSHA attributed that to improvements in workplace safety and a decrease in manufacturing jobs.
But the GAO report cited several academic studies that found OSHA data failed to include up to two-thirds of all workplace injuries and illnesses.
The report noted that because of OSHA's "sole reliance on employer-reported injury and illness data" in one of its major surveys, "some academic studies have reported that the survey may undercount the total number of workplace injuries and illnesses."
The accountability office also found that more than a third of the occupational health practitioners it surveyed said that employers or workers had pressured them to provide insufficient medical treatment to hide or play down work-related injuries or illnesses.
OSHA requires employers with more than 10 workers to record every work-related injury or illness that results in lost work time or medical treatment other than first aid. Some occupational health practitioners say that to avoid recording an injury, some employers will try to limit treatment for a serious injury to just first aid.
In other cases, the practitioners said, employers might seek alternative diagnoses if the initial diagnosis would result in a recordable injury or illness.
According to the GAO report, 67 percent of the 1,187 occupational health practitioners surveyed reported observing worker fear of disciplinary action for reporting an injury or illness, and 46 percent said that this fear had some impact on the accuracy of employers' injury and illness records.
Tribune reporter Mike Gorrell contributed to this story
