Injury and illness recordkeeping is the part of Cal/OSHA compliance that employers assume they can catch up on later. Then an inspector opens the visit by asking for the last five years of Form 300 logs, and the conversation goes downhill from there. Title 8, Section 14300 and the sections that follow it set out exactly which California employers must keep the Cal/OSHA Form 300 Log, the Form 300A Annual Summary, and the Form 301 Incident Report, what must go on them, and when the summary must be posted. The rules are not complicated, but they are specific, and the errors are easy for an inspector to spot.
Who Must Keep the Records
If your company had more than ten employees at any point during the previous calendar year, counting all locations and all part-time, temporary, and seasonal workers, you must keep the Cal/OSHA Form 300 records unless your industry is listed as partially exempt. The exemption list is based on industry classification and covers certain low-hazard retail, service, finance, and professional categories. Construction, manufacturing, warehousing, agriculture, healthcare, and most trades are not exempt.
Two points trip up employers. First, the threshold is company-wide, not per site. Second, partial exemption only relieves you of routine recordkeeping. Every California employer must still report a work-related death or serious injury or illness to Cal/OSHA under Section 342, and must still file the Employer’s Report (Form 5020) under Labor Code Section 6409.1.
The Three Forms and What Each One Does
Form 300, Log of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses. A running log, kept by establishment, with one line for each recordable case: name, job title, date, location, description, classification, and days away or restricted.
Form 301, Injury and Illness Incident Report. The detailed record for each individual case. You must complete it within seven calendar days of learning about a recordable injury or illness. An equivalent form, such as a workers’ compensation report, may substitute if it contains all the same information.
Form 300A, Summary of Work-Related Injuries and Illnesses. The year-end summary of the log, showing total cases, total days, and injury and illness types, along with the establishment’s annual average number of employees and total hours worked. It is the only one of the three that is posted for employees to see.
What Counts as Recordable
A case is recordable if it is work-related, is a new case, and results in one or more of the following:
- Death
- Days away from work
- Restricted work or transfer to another job
- Medical treatment beyond first aid
- Loss of consciousness
- A significant injury or illness diagnosed by a physician or other licensed health care professional, such as a fractured bone, a punctured eardrum, or an occupational cancer
The regulation contains a specific, closed list of what counts as first aid. Anything not on that list is medical treatment. Prescription medication, sutures, a rigid splint, and physical therapy are medical treatment. A single dose of over-the-counter medication at nonprescription strength, cleaning and bandaging a wound, a tetanus shot, and drilling a fingernail to relieve pressure are first aid. Whether a doctor was seen is not the test; what the doctor did is the test.
Work-relatedness is presumed for events in the work environment, subject to a short list of exceptions. Recording a case is not an admission of fault and is not the same as accepting a workers’ compensation claim. Leaving a case off the log because you intend to dispute the claim creates a recordkeeping violation on top of the claim.
Counting Days and Handling Privacy Cases
Days away and days restricted are counted as calendar days, including weekends and holidays, beginning the day after the injury, and may be capped at 180. The log is a living document; entries from the current year and the prior four years must be updated when you learn new information.
Certain cases are privacy concern cases, including injuries to intimate body parts, sexual assaults, mental illness, HIV and hepatitis, needlesticks and sharps injuries involving contamination, and other illnesses the employee asks to keep confidential. For those cases, the employee’s name is not entered on the log; write “privacy case” instead and keep a separate confidential list linking case numbers to names.
The February Through April Posting Requirement
At the end of each calendar year, you must review the log for accuracy, complete the Form 300A, and have it certified by a company executive: an owner, a corporate officer, the highest-ranking company official at the establishment, or that person’s immediate supervisor. The executive’s signature affirms that the summary is correct and complete. This is a personal certification, not a delegable clerical step.
The certified Form 300A must be posted where employee notices are customarily displayed from February 1 through April 30 of the following year. A summary showing zero cases must still be posted, and employers with more than one establishment post a separate summary at each one.
Certain employers must also submit Form 300A data electronically to the federal Injury Tracking Application by March 2 each year, and some larger establishments in designated industries must submit Form 300 and 301 data as well. The size and industry thresholds have changed in recent years, so confirm whether your establishment is covered rather than assuming.
Retention and Employee Access
Keep the Form 300, the privacy case list, the Form 300A, and the Form 301 reports for five years following the end of the year they cover. Employees, former employees, and their representatives have the right to see the log and the summary, and you must provide a copy by the end of the next business day after a request.
The Mistakes Inspectors Find First
The same problems appear again and again:
- No log at all, because someone decided the company was exempt without checking the industry list or the employee count
- Form 300A posted but never certified, or certified by an office manager rather than a company executive
- Cases recorded only if a workers’ compensation claim was filed, and cases omitted because the claim was denied
- Restricted-duty cases left off because the employee “came back to work”
- Day counts stopped at the end of the year rather than carried through to the end of the case
- Employee names entered on privacy cases
- Logs kept only at headquarters, and records discarded after two or three years
Recordkeeping violations are usually classified as regulatory or general rather than serious, but a pattern of missing or falsified records can be treated as willful. More importantly, a poor log tells an inspector that the rest of the safety program probably has gaps too.
What to Do Now
- Confirm your coverage: count your peak employee headcount from last year and check your industry classification against the partial exemption list.
- Pull the current-year log and reconcile it against your workers’ compensation first reports and your clinic records. Every recordable case should appear on both.
- Verify every open case has a Form 301 or an equivalent completed within seven days.
- Set a calendar reminder in January to finalize the log, complete and certify the 300A, and post it February 1.
- Assign one trained person to the log at each establishment, and locate the last five years of records so they can be produced within a business day.
McNeil Safety Consulting audits injury and illness records, trains the people who keep them, and builds the reconciliation process that keeps your log, your claims file, and your clinic paperwork telling the same story. If you are not confident your Form 300 records would survive an inspection, call (626) 546-9384 or learn more about our occupational health and safety services.