The Department of Labor (DOL) April 7 announced the launch of the Online Enforcement Database which will provide previously unavailable data from five DOL agencies, including citations by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and wage and hour violations. DOL launched the database to comply with the
December 2009 memo from the White House encouraging transparency in government agencies.
Under this new initiative, enforcement statistics data will be available for OSHA, the Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). Previously, only OSHA and MSHA had their enforcement data available online. The DOL is calling this database “a work in progress” and says “new features, functionality and search criteria will be added over time.” The database is available at
http://ogesdw.dol.gov/.
OSHA will provide records of citations, penalty assessments, reasoning for specific inspections as well as descriptions of accidents resulting in injury or fatalities for the nearly 100,000 inspections conducted annually. According to the DOL, OSHA will update inspection details nightly for both closed cases and for open cases whose citations are at least 30 days old. OSHA will update accident descriptions weekly.
WHD will provide information on all concluded compliance actions since fiscal year 2009. This includes any violations and the back wage amount; the number of employees due back wages; and civil money penalties assessed. The data will be updated quarterly.
EBSA will provide enforcement data on closed cases that resulted in a penalty assessment under the Deficient Filer program, the Late Filer program and the Non-Filer program, beginning with fiscal year 2009. This data will be updated quarterly.
The data provided by OFCCP for the enforcement database consists of completed compliance evaluations and complaint investigations, conducted by the OFCCP, since fiscal year 2004. The data will be updated monthly.
In addition to the Online Enforcement Database, DOL launched a Grants Map that offers a breakdown of grants awarded on a state by state basis from the DOL. The map allows users to obtain a summary of the sources and amounts of money granted to individual states by the DOL between February 2009 and February 2010. According to the DOL, this feature eventually may be used to facilitate grant applications. The Grants Map is available at
http://www.dol.gov/dol/grants/map.
For more information about the Grants Map or the Online Enforcement Database, visit
http://www.dol.gov/open/#Initiatives.