Government accountability office recommends faster communication for osha, epa

A Government Accountability Office report released Wednesday April 30 compares how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Prevention, Pesticides, and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) developed material designed to alert auto repair workers to the possibility of asbestos exposure in automotive brakes. The report was prepared for members of Congress, including U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey, chair of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections. The report found that both agencies took several years to complete their reports, but while OSHA took five and a half years to publish its Asbestos Safety and Health Information Bulletin, OPPTS took only three and a half years to publish its information. According to the GAO report, OSHA officials claimed that the length of time they took to complete the bulletin was partly due to “the need to address uncertainties regarding the prevalence of asbestos in brake products.” However, the final GAO report noted that “timeliness seems especially relevant once an agency has determined that there is a need to communicate information about how people can protect themselves from health and safety hazards to which they might be exposed… Having such information might lead people to make different decisions or take different actions to protect themselves than they would in the absence of such information.” Essentially, that people who know about the dangers of asbestos will act differently when they might be at risk of exposure. It seems obvious, but apparently it wasn’t so obvious to the OSHA. The report also said that OSHA and OPPTS procedures for designing communication brochures and bulletins don’t currently have any time-oriented benchmarks. There are no regulations in place to ensure that communications like these are completed and disseminated to the public in a reasonable amount of time. While it’s not necessarily possible to establish one single standard that can apply to every situation, the GAO report says that both OSHA and OPPTS could benefit from some time-frames or benchmarks to provide some motivation or impetus for getting informational bulletins out to the public more quickly. The report also noted that “It should also be remembered that one of the reasons why agencies use alternatives to rulemakingâ€"such as guidance or general communication productsâ€"is because these alternatives have the advantage of being less time consuming than rulemaking.” In other words, the guidelines issued by these agencies are suggestions, not laws, and thus there is no reason for issuing such guidelines to take several years. The GAO report recommends that OSHA’s Chief and EPA’s Administrator ensure that their key policies and procedures for preparing communications products includes time-oriented benchmarks to speed up the process of issuing essential information to the public. (Source: Asbestos and Mesothelioma News)