Accident reporting, system safety program requirements

It would be useful to check these impressions against the official statistics on occupational risk collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), but these are notoriously unreliable. Indeed, the National Research Council, an offshoot of the National Academy of Sciences that reports on public policy issues, found the BLS data inadequate for monitoring the effectiveness of safety programs (Saddler, 1987). There are several problems. First, the data are collected as part of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) reporting system, which subjects them to distorting incentive effects. Firms are required to maintain logs of fatal and nonfatal accidents, but they have an incentive to underreport this information since it could be used as evidence to support workers compensation or tort claims by workers, and because... 

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