Office of the City Auditor

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Issued: April 2001

SUMMARY

The City of Austin, like all public and private sector employers, is obligated by law to provide a safe work environment for its employees. Moreover, a safe work environment can enhance worker morale and productivity and help to minimize workers’ compensation and related costs.

Currently the City of Austin lacks an infrastructure that sets employee safety as a corporate priority with requisite goals, strategies to accomplish the goals, and measures to gauge performance. Further, departmental management is not held accountable for employee safety through established performance expectations. In turn, many employees are not being held accountable for working in accordance with safety standards or “best practice” guidelines. As an example, we found instances where employees had violated a safety guideline and were still awarded wage continuation benefits.

In 1992, the City Manager’s Office assigned responsibility for employee safety to the Human Resources Department (HRD) as part of a citywide risk management function. However, over the past several years, the HRD has reduced the emphasis on employee safety, and in FY 00, eliminated the last two positions devoted to corporate safety issues without assigning those functions elsewhere. As a result, City departments are operating in a decentralized environment regarding employee safety issues, yet receive little direction or assistance from the HRD.

Because the corporate safety function has been virtually eliminated through downsizing, basic oversight and support activities such as systematically and comprehensively assessing and addressing departmental safety needs and ensuring compliance with laws, regulations, and City policies are not performed. For example we found inconsistent compliance in several City locations with the Texas Hazard Communication Act (THCA), which requires notification and education of employees about hazardous substances at the work place. Although we tested only a sample of City locations for compliance with THCA, the prevalence of deficiencies identified provide a strong indication that such deficiencies exist elsewhere in the City.

Citywide information shows a recent increase in incurred workers’ compensation costs, which represent the total anticipated cost of claims from initial to final payment. Specifically, while the number of claims increased from 1,516 to 1,715 between FY 98 and FY 00, incurred costs almost doubled, increasing over $3.0 million to $6.54 million. In addition to the workers’ compensation claims costs, the City also spent about $3.0 million to cover the cost of the third-party administrator for workers’ compensation, the wage continuation benefit, and the full-duty wages paid to employees on limited-duty assignments.

We reviewed the safety programs in Emergency Medical Services, Solid Waste Services, and Parks and Recreation and found that a stronger safety oversight function is needed in each department. All three departments lacked at least some practices, procedures, or processes found in effective safety programs. For example, in each department we found

• an ineffective, or non-existent, safety committee,
• lack of safety goals and strategies,
• no accountability structure to achieve a safe work environment,
• lack of regular review and evaluation of the safety program,
• inadequate safety training and refresher training, and
• failure to capture and use information on causes of injuries to develop mitigating strategies to avoid future injuries.