Modernizing occupational safety and health enforcement: Improving OSHA's capability to prevent, detect, and control grave risks to U.S. workers

Regulatory agencies established to protect the public all face a fundamental challenge: there are many more firms to inspect than there are government personnel to inspect them. For example, more than 50,000 Americans die each year from health and safety hazards at work, but the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) can only visit about 1 percent of the nation's potentially dangerous workplaces each year. Improving OSHA's and other agencies' techniques for selecting targets for inspection could help prevent numerous unnecessary injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. A multidisciplinary team of experts in science, law, and statistics from the University of Pennsylvania will use cutting edge analytical techniques to develop and test alternative strategies for deploying regulatory inspection resources based on “profiling” firms and identifying those most likely to be exposing workers to unsafe and unhealthy conditions. The firm profiles will be based on financial, demographic, and other characteristics of individual companies, in particular their compliance and violation history with other regulatory agencies.