Last week, North Carolina Commissioner of Labor Luke Farley announced that the North Carolina Occupational Safety and Health Administration (NCOSHA) will no longer apply discounts when assessing penalties against employers found to have violated OSHA safety standards involving an employee fatality. In most situations, NCOSHA takes the maximum penalty amount and discounts it for factors including the size of the employer and its degree of cooperation with the agency during the investigation. 

Presumably, this means that in the event of a workplace fatality, employers will be assessed the current maximum penalty of $16,550 for each serious violation, and $165,514 for repeat or willful violations. In many NCOSHA investigations, employee fatalities result in multiple separate citations, meaning that this maximum penalty will be multiplied.

In his announcement, Farley said that he was ending NCOSHA’s "death discounts," and that employers should not be treated differently for workplace fatalities based on the size of their payroll. He stated that the purpose of the announcement is to change North Carolina employers' behaviors and safety practices and to create a greater incentive to prevent workplace injuries and deaths.

An employer’s number of workers often correlates with its financial resources. This change is likely to have a greater impact on small companies that lack the focused safety programs and personnel found with larger employers. There is no minimum number of employees for NCOSHA jurisdiction, and even the smallest of companies now face significant financial consequences in the event of citations following a workplace death.

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