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News Release USDL: 96-308
Wednesday, July 31, 1996
Contact: Susan Hall Fleming (202) 219-8151

Employers who correct workplace safety and health hazards immediately during an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspection now can receive a 15-percent penalty reduction, the agency announced today.

"In announcing his plan to reinvent OSHA last year, President Clinton promised that employers who 'do right' would also 'do well' under the New OSHA. Today we are delivering on that promise," said Assistant Secretary of Labor Joseph A. Dear.

"When we find a problem and the employer fixes it right away, there will be an automatic 15 percent reduction in the penalty. That's before any additional reductions for size, good faith or history are applied," Dear said.

OSHA's "Quick Fix" abatement incentive program encourages employers to "do the right thing" by rewarding them for fixing certain less serious problems immediately once an OSHA inspector identifies them. OSHA compliance officers will discuss the Quick Fix program, effective Sept. 1 at the beginning of each inspection to ensure that employers are aware of the benefits of prompt correction of hazards.

Begun as a pilot effort in OSHA's Parsippany, N.J., area office, Quick Fix received the National Performance Review's hammer award in June 1994.

Under Quick Fix, 15 percent penalty reductions apply to corrective actions taken the same day the inspector identifies the problem, in no case more than 24 hours, for:

• Any size employer in any industry.

• Both safety and health violations.

• Only individual violations, not to the citation or penalty as a whole.

• Only corrective action that is permanent and substantial (such as installing a guard on a machine), including engineering and/or administrative controls.

Reductions will NOT be given for:

• Violations related to fatal injuries or illnesses or to a serious incident resulting in serious injuries to workers.

• Violations classified as high or medium gravity serious, willful, repeat, failure to abate or "blatant" violations that are easily corrected (such as turning on a ventilation system to reduce worker exposure to a hazardous atmosphere).

• Temporary or superficial actions.

Various pilot Quick Fix versions have been tried in OSHA offices across the country during the past year. Now OSHA is formally establishing the incentive program across all the states it covers. The agency plans to evaluate the effectiveness of the program after one year.

The 25 states and territories operating their own job safety and health programs are encouraged, but not required, to establish similar or alternate programs.

Quick Fix is detailed in OSHA's Compliance directive CPL 2.112, Nationwide Quick-Fix Program. The five-page directive will be available on the Internet at http://www.osha.gov under Other OSHA Documents, Directives, CPL 2.112. This information also will be placed on an upcoming issue of the OSHA CD-ROM. Single printed copies are available by mail after Aug. 5, 1996, to requestors who send a self-addressed label to OSHA Publications, P.O. Box 37535, Washington, D.C. 20013-7535, telephone (202) 219-4667, fax (202) 219-9266.