WORK-RELATED INJURIES UNDERREPORTED

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 compiles each year,
the Government Accountability Office said Monday.

The report, by the G.A.O., 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 that their
co-workers might lose rewards, like 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
Senator 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."

Mr. Harkin was one of the Congressional leaders who requested the report.

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, which include requiring
inspectors to interview employees during all audits to check the
accuracy of employer-provided injury data.

The accountability office noted that the rate of workplace injuries
- -- there were 4 million in 2007, including 5,600 fatalities -- has
declined fairly steadily since 1992, which OSHA attributed to
improvements in workplace safety and the decline in the number of
manufacturing jobs.

But the G.A.O. report cited several academic studies that found that
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.

The safety and health administration 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.

One manager took an injured worker to several medical providers until
the manager found one who would certify that treatment required only
first aid, thus making it an injury that did not have to be recorded,
one practitioner told researchers, according to the report. Many
employers fear that reporting numerous injuries will prompt a
full-scale OSHA inspection.

The accountability office said that 53 percent of health
practitioners had reported experiencing pressure from company
officials to play down injuries or illnesses, and that 47 percent had
reported experiencing this pressure from workers.

"This report confirms that when it comes to the documenting of
workplace injuries, we can't just take employers at their word," said
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and chairwoman of the
Subcommittee on Employment and Workplace Safety. "The system, to this
point, has been all too easy to game."

According to the G.A.O. report, 67 percent of the 1,187 occupational
health practitioners surveyed had reported observing worker fear of
disciplinary action for reporting an injury or illness, and 46
percent said this fear had some impact on the accuracy of employers'
injury and illness records.

One reason workers fail to report injuries, the report said, was that
their employers required drug testing after incidents resulting in
reported injuries or illnesses, regardless of any evidence of drug use.

The report also questioned employers' safety incentive programs,
which reward workers when their worksites have few recordable
injuries or illnesses.

While these programs can promote safe behavior, the report said
three-quarters of health practitioners said they believed that
workers sometimes avoided reporting work-related injuries and
illnesses as a result of these programs because they feared that
doing so would cause them or their co-workers to miss the chance of
winning prizes.