The Occupational Safety and Health Act states that it is congressional policy to “assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions . . .” In fiscal year 2002, OSHA pursued this mandate with about $443 million and 2,316 employees, including 1,123 inspectors. Despite this broad mandate, OSHA does not have complete authority over all worksites in this country. For example, through the appropriations process, Congress has placed restrictions on OSHA’s enforcement activities regarding small farming operations and small employers in low hazard industries. Also, pursuant to the act, OSHA has delegated federal enforcement responsibility to 23 state and territorial governments that carry out their own programs. OSHA has provided half the funding for these programs to state-plan states, which must have program standards that are “at least as effective” as the federal program. In other cases, federal agencies other than OSHA have jurisdiction over particular workplaces or hazards. For example, the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration is responsible for ensuring the safety of mining worksites, while transportation-related hazards are generally within the jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation. OSHA also relies on BLS to provide it with data on injuries, illnesses, and fatalities. Since 1992, BLS has surveyed a sample of approximately 180,000 employers and asked them to report information on the number of work- related injuries and illnesses occurring at their worksites. This information comes from injury and illness records that private industry employers are required to maintain. From this information, BLS calculates injury and illness rates. BLS identifies fatalities from a census of all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City, which report on all work-related fatalities within their jurisdictions. BLS requires the reporting entities to corroborate reports on fatalities by obtaining multiple sources of information, such as OSHA fatality information, death certificates, medical examiners’ reports, media reports, and workers’ compensation documents. BLS makes injury, illness, and fatality data available at the national as well as at the state level. To ensure that it makes the best use of its resources, OSHA, like other federal agencies, established strategic goals that drive agency efforts and has begun to measure the attainment of those goals. In OSHA’s 1997-2002 strategic plan, it identified an overarching goal to “mprove workplace safety and health for all workers, as evidenced by fewer hazards, reduced exposures, and fewer injuries, illnesses, and fatalities.” OSHA characterized this overarching goal as the cornerstone of its enforcement program. According to OSHA, it planned on “focusing . . . gency resources on the most prevalent types of workplace injuries and illnesses, the most hazardous industries, and the most hazardous workplaces.” OSHA identified specific areas that it believed were the most hazardous and by which OSHA would measure its progress. These specific areas, as shown in table 1, focused on three hazards and five industries or industry sectors (which are subsets of larger industries), and are known as OSHA’s “3-by-5 goals.” OSHA also identified a goal to reduce fatalities in the construction industry by 15 percent and reduce injuries and illnesses by 20 percent in 100,000 workplaces where OSHA initiates an intervention. Because GPRA applies only to federal agencies, the 23 state-plan states are not required to adopt these goals. OSHA asked these states to establish industry and hazard goals similar to OSHA’s 3-by-5 goals relevant to the worksites in their respective states. In some cases, the state-plan states selected hazards or industries that mirrored the federal ones; in other cases, they did not. Recognizing that its 3-by-5 goals would probably not include every hazard and industry that would prove dangerous to workers over the 5-year duration of the strategic plan, OSHA established various other mechanisms through which it could identify areas that pose hazards to workers. Through national emphasis programs (NEP), OSHA headquarters has identified industries or hazards deserving priority attention from its area offices. In the last several years, OSHA has averaged about 10 NEPs annually. Some NEPs have reflected areas selected in the strategic plan, while others have focused on other areas (e.g., the petrochemical industry) not in the strategic plan. While OSHA provides direction to its area offices for implementing NEPs, the area offices have considerable flexibility in selecting actual worksites. In addition, area offices can also use local emphasis programs (LEP) to highlight industries or hazards within their jurisdictions that they believe are hazardous. (See table 2.) OSHA also has two national targeting programs that are aimed at identifying worksites for priority inspection. First, as shown in table 2, OSHA has a targeting program that relies on data from the F.W. Dodge Report for identifying worksites in the construction industry. Second, OSHA has a site-specific targeting program (SST), which identifies a list of high-hazard worksites in other industries through its OSHA data initiative. OSHA’s targeting efforts must be carried out on a neutral and objective basis, in accordance with legal requirements. As another way to help ensure that its resources are well used, OSHA has restructured local office operations. Before fiscal year 1997, area offices were organized in single-discipline teams that responded to worker complaints and conducted planned inspections. Starting in fiscal year 1997, OSHA reorganized its local offices into multidisciplinary teams comprised of both safety inspectors and health inspectors. These teams specialized in either responsive activities (i.e., responding to worker complaints, accidents, or serious injuries; or acting on referrals from other agencies) or planned activities, such as conducting planned inspections and providing employers with compliance assistance (i.e., various efforts to help employers who voluntarily seek to comply with OSHA regulations). To assist these teams, OSHA placed a compliance assistance specialist at each area office who provides services such as helping employers correct hazards identified during inspections. OSHA also instituted new procedures that permitted area offices to expedite the process for responding to informal worker complaints by allowing inspectors to resolve complaints by phone or fax without visiting the worksite. OSHA has also improved training opportunities for its inspection workforce. The agency has expanded course offerings available to inspectors at the OSHA Training Institute (OTI) and through satellite delivered and web-based training. In addition, OTI is revising its curriculum to prepare new inspectors both for their new jobs and for professional certification in either safety, health, or as an engineer. The agency has also developed a plan to assist experienced inspectors to obtain professional certification, should they choose to do so, and to retain professional certifications already achieved. The curriculum for professional certification will vary considerably depending on the type of certification sought by the inspector and the inspector’s current experience and level of training. OSHA’s certification assistance also includes paying for preparation materials and certification examination fees and making time available at work for staff to study. Concurrently, OSHA managers are using an individual development plan (IDP) process to help inspectors identify training needs and select appropriate training opportunities. The targeting processes that OSHA used have not fully ensured that the agency effectively identifies hazardous worksites for priority inspection. Specifically, when targeting the construction industry, OSHA relied on a database that did not adequately identify the smaller, potentially more hazardous worksites. In the meantime, however, OSHA area offices have taken actions on their own to target small construction sites. Also, the efficiency of OSHA’s efforts to target high-hazard worksites across other industries through its SST program may be limited by faulty information that caused OSHA to send inspectors to worksites that were either not hazardous or that had hazards that were outside of OSHA’s control. OSHA’s current construction industry targeting procedure has not provided local offices with adequate information on smaller construction worksites. OSHA relies on information from the F.W. Dodge Report database, provided by the University of Tennessee, to identify construction worksites for potential inspection. This database provides selected information on each construction site, including the projected start and completion dates. However, the start and completion dates, which are added to the database at the University of Tennessee, are often erroneous for small construction sites. Since they had more confidence in the information the database provided on larger worksites, OSHA’s area offices generally selected larger construction worksites to inspect. About half of the area office directors we interviewed said they do not request information on smaller construction sites through the F.W. Dodge Report process. Several local office directors told us that, when relying on the database to identify small construction worksites, they would only send inspectors to areas where there were multiple worksites in close proximity in the hope of finding at least one that would be available for inspection. Knowledgeable experts and officials within and outside OSHA, including area office officials, saw this as problematic because larger construction worksites are generally safer than smaller ones, although they acknowledge that conclusive data to demonstrate this are unavailable. OSHA officials acknowledge that the F.W. Dodge process can be improved to better identify high-hazard construction worksites and are undertaking efforts to identify ways to improve the construction targeting process. OSHA has asked the University of Tennessee to study all factors, including size, that may lead to injuries and illnesses in construction in order to determine the relative level of hazard represented by individual construction worksites. As of July 2002, the University of Tennessee had yet to initiate work on this study. This effort should help OSHA use more sophisticated criteria to select the most hazardous construction worksites for priority inspection, but it does not aim to address the immediate bias toward targeting larger construction worksites. To address current problems, we found that several of the local offices were using various methods to supplement the F.W.