The U.S. Department of Labor concluded that the agency tasked with ensuring miners' safety was not properly conducting its pre-assessment conferences, a step taken to allow mine operators to challenge a decision before proceeding to a more costly court proceeding.
The Office of Inspector General, or OIG, wrote in a report published Sept. 25 that it had received several complaints about the U.S Mine Safety and Health Administration's conferencing program, including allegations that the entity did not consider evidence in conferences when making its decisions.
The OIG conducted a review of the administration and concluded that it failed to consistently document specific reasons when it modified or vacated a violation in a conference decision. In the OIG's sample, this was the case in 75% of its files. This made it unclear why MSHA made the decision.
Only 22 of the 89 conference files in the sample with a changed violation contained adequate documentation explaining the rationale for the changes, according to the report. MSHA also determined that its representatives were not properly documenting files in its post-accident reports on some recent mining disasters.
The OIG found 163 changed violations out of 186 conference files and could not find evidence that the representatives communicated the reasons for adjusting a violation in 41% of those files. Based on this review, the OIG projected that there may have been as many as 9,310 missed opportunities to provide feedback to inspectors.
"We determined insufficient training, guidance, system controls, and oversight caused these issues," according to the OIG report. "Consequently, these issues led to inconsistent processes among districts and potential inconsistencies in the quality of future violations. In addition, these issues reduced assurance that MSHA was making well-supported decisions."
The administration also determined in its report that MSHA did not consistently provide feedback to its workforce pertaining to conference results, nor did it "effectively monitor its systems to ensure it had complete and accurate conference data" to identify potential issues.
Among several other recommendations, the OIG told MSHA to conduct more training on these processes and review each district's procedures to be sure representatives are communicating why they modified or vacated a ruling.
