All employers in many categories (including agriculture) must submit their OSHA 300A summary information to OSHA via their web portal. This year’s deadline is March 2 (tomorrow). Please take a few minutes to make sure you have done this. The website is https://www.osha.gov/injuryreporting/ . When you go to that page, look for the Injury Tracking Application to begin the process.

For the past several years, OSHA has been requiring that all employers in most industries, to submit their OSHA 300A summary information to the agency via the web. Most cotton gins are captured in this group of employers that are required to report their data. The only ones that may not have to are the gins that, at no point during the previous calendar year, in this case 2020, had 20 or more employees (peak employment). If you had 19 or fewer employees for the entire year, you will not have to submit your data.

One of the critical things you may want to double check is your DART rate. Please refer to this article that Andy wrote on how to calculate your DART rate. The reason this is critical is that in the past year a few of our members have received some letters from OSHA regarding their DART rate compared to “Industry Average”. Since the Industry Average has been derived on a very small number of sampled employers in the past it may be inaccurate. When the Obama Administration first proposed this electronic submission, the rule’s preamble specifically discussed that the data (DART Rate) may become public, allowing for current or potential employees to see the data in a way similar to how people can look up or view a restaurant’s Health Department Inspection information. The Trump administration stopped that but we are in a new era and there’s no telling what may happen going forward.

The page linked above has a lot of Frequently Asked questions on this process. . You can find most answers on this page or contact Andy Knowlton with Questions regarding the OSHA 300 or 300A summary. We can help with the forms but not the site unfortunately.

Give us a call if you have questions.