Safety audits allow you to protect your business from potential safety hazards. A good audit will include a wall to wall inspection covering your machines, tools, personnel, training, systems, accidents, hazards, and processes to ensure you know all of your hazards and are following all relevant OSHA standards. They provide a secondary defense against OSHA, helping your safety team to overcome audit difficulties.

Without annual safety audits, you do not have an outside set of eyes verifying the accuracy of your Safety and Health Management System and the procedures you have in place to mitigate risk from worksite hazards. You also do not have anyone making sure you remain up to code as standards change year to year. Without this secondary verification, you are placing an additional burden on your safety team. No matter how qualified your safety experts are, it is always important to have someone else review their work; someone who is impartial and removed from the situation.

And if that isn’t enough, it is also a requirement of OSHA. OSHA requires a third party safety audit annually. Without the annual audits, you will be in violation of OSHA should they audit you. OSHA audits are hard enough, there is no reason to give them a free citation.

Should you have any questions about safety audits, their importance, and how they can benefit you, please feel free to contact us. If you have any advice on what to look for in a third party safety audit company, leave a comment.