Annual OSHA Reporting Without the Stress

February 10th, 2022 by Dakota Software Staff

Most companies in the United States are required to submit work-related injury and illness data to OSHA. If you have never done it before, just the idea of reporting to OSHA is enough to give you anxiety, but the process does not have to be scary if you know what to look out for. First, we must clarify exactly what OSHA requires to be recorded and reported.

OSHA isn’t necessarily concerned with minor workplace injuries that only require first aid. They want to know about serious, recordable, work-related injuries and illnesses. Here is how OSHA distinguishes between the two.

Recordable or First Aid?

First Aid injuries can include but are not limited to:

• Using a non-prescription medication

• Cleaning, flushing, or soaking wounds on the surface of the skin

• Using wound coverings such as bandages, Band-Aids, or gauze

• Using hot or cold therapy

• Using any non-rigid means of support

• Draining fluid from a blister

Recordable injuries or illnesses can include but are not limited to:

• Fatality

• Medical treatment beyond first aid

• Loss of consciousness, days away from work, restricted work, or transfer to another job

• Cancer, chronic irreversible diseases, fractured or cracked bones or teeth, and punctured eardrums

Recording

If your company has a new work-related injury that you’ve classified as recordable, then the next step is to record the incident on OSHA Forms 301 and 300.

OSHA Form 301, or its equivalent, is the first form you should fill out when a recordable work-related injury or illness has occurred. This form has detailed information about each injury or illness. It tells when the employee was hired, what were they doing when they got hurt, where were they treated, etc. Form 301 must be filled out within 7 days of the employer being notified of the incident.

OSHA Form 300 is a log of all recordable injuries or illnesses your company had during the year. It includes basic information and categorizes injuries and illnesses in several ways. Similar to Form 301, every recordable injury or illness must be recorded on Form 300 within 7 days of the employer being notified.

Reporting to OSHA

All OSHA recordable injuries and illnesses are reported annually using OSHA Form 300A. OSHA must be notified within 8 hours of any work-related fatality, and within 24 hours for an inpatient hospitalization, amputation, or the loss of an eye.

Form 300A is a year-end report which provides a basic summary of recordable injuries or illnesses that occurred during the year. It must be submitted to OSHA by March 2nd of the following year, which must be done digitally using OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (ITA). Note that you can either manually enter the data into the ITA or upload it from .

Annual Reporting

If you’ve never had to submit your annual report to OSHA before then the process can feel confusing. Here are 5 numbers that might trip you up your first time.

1. The type and amount of recordable cases you had throughout the year. If you’ve kept up with OSHA Forms 301 and 300 then finding these numbers should be as simple as adding them up and putting them in the necessary categories. However, life is not always so simple. Many companies struggle to maintain these records and are left at the end of the year scrambling and digging through files trying to find their injury data. This brings unnecessary stress and the regulatory risk of misrepresenting your injury and illness numbers to OSHA. To solve this issue, many modern companies have moved away from managing injury and illness data themselves and now use specialized software to track their incidents, make the necessary calculations, and populate their end-of-year reports.

2. The average number of employees you had during the year. To find the average number, you must identify the number of employees you paid in each pay period. This number should include all full-time, part-time, and temporary workers. Add those all up and then divide by the number of pay periods during the year. Round the answer up to the next highest whole number and you get your average.

3. The total number of hours worked during the year. To find the number of hours, you first take the total number of full-time employees and multiply that by the general amount of hours each employee worked during the year (In most companies this comes out to about 2,000 hours per year per employee.) Then add overtime and all hours worked by temporary, seasonal, and part-time employees. Do not include any vacation, holidays, sick leave, or PTO in your calculation.

4. Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR). To calculate this rate, divide 200,000 by the total hours worked by all employees during the year to get a "scaling factor", then multiply this ratio by the total number of recordable cases during the year. The number 200,000 is a normalizing estimate based on a hypothetical company with 100 employees who work 2,000 hours per year. This normalization allows companies within the same industry to be comparable when looking at their injury rates no matter the number of employees they have.

5. Days Away, Restricted, or Transfers (DART). This rate is calculated in the same way as the TRIR, except that instead of multiplying by the total number of recordable cases, you multiply by the number of recordable cases that resulted in days away from work, restricted duty, or transfer to another role.

Digital Solutions

The process of recording and reporting workplace injury and illness information to OSHA can feel cumbersome, but it does not have to be. Digital solutions, like Dakota Scout for EHS Incident Management, are specifically designed to track incidents, provide visibility into trends, and auto-populate your end-of-year report. Having software to calculate your injury and illness numbers can also alleviate the uncertainty of doing the calculations by hand. Dakota Scout can automatically calculate and populate your OSHA 300A and have it ready to upload to OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application (ITA).

Software not only helps you fill out your reports. The data that you collect through the recording of injury and illness incidents can also help your organization to take a proactive approach towards safety and EHS compliance. A healthy safety and EHS compliance program must have a robust incident management process. To make accurate and timely EHS decisions, the leadership team must understand why incidents are happening and what the trends suggest could happen next. Dakota Software’s ProActivity Suite can help your company get visibility into your injury data to allow you to take that proactive approach towards safety.

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