Don't look to the government for protection against sore joints and tendons at work. Starting in October, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules would have required employers to inform workers about repetitive strain injuries and to fix equipment when injuries were reported. Your employer may already have an ergonomics program, anyway. Liberty Mutual, the nation's largest workers' compensation insurer, has 600 safety specialists, who often recommend ergonomic fixes to clients.
Many repairs are low cost.
At Liberty's Boston headquarters, for example, all workers are measured and their desks and computers adjusted to encourage strain-free posture. The IRS is rejecting a large fraction of such returns this year. TaxCut says 20 percent of its E-filers are being rebuffed, compared with 12 percent last year. The culprit is a new IRS procedure to free electronic filers from having to mail in a written signature. Until this year only selected taxpayers who received an electronic ID from the IRS could avoid a paper signature.