South By North Strategies, Ltd.

The Charlotte Observer reports on the results of a U.S. Department of Labor audit of  workplace safety programs in North Carolina and South Carolina.

Compliance officers in the Carolinas understate the severity of problems by misclassifying violations and rarely label problems as “willful” – the most serious degree.
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N.C. compliance officers issued only one willful violation in 2009 “due to the belief that it would be too difficult to pass the review process,” auditors said. South Carolina had five willful violations.
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Auditors said of the N.C. program: “Some violations that would most likely have been classified as serious by federal OSHA were classified as non-serious by the state, and some violations categorized as low or medium severity would have been categorized as high severity by federal OSHA.”
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Companies receive higher fines when they are cited for serious or willful violations.
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North Carolina lets bureaucrats purge documents from case files when they are closed. Removing the documentation limits the state’s ability to review a company’s history and properly investigate future violations, auditors said.