OSHA & regulation9 min read

Contractor safety management: prequalification to site access

Whose OSHA log a contractor injury goes on has a settled answer, and it turns on a single fact: who supervised the work day to day. The two questions that arrive alongside it, whether that contractor was qualified to be on your site and whether anybody checked, have no equivalent answer in law. They are settled by whatever your system happened to record before the injury.

Contractor safety management fails at exactly that recording, and quietly. The prequalification packet is collected once, saved to a shared drive, and never looked at again. Certificates expire without anybody noticing, and nobody finds out until all three questions arrive on the same afternoon.

What should contractor prequalification actually test?

Prequalification is a screen. Run it as a filing exercise and it stops screening anything. Each criterion needs a threshold, an evidence document, a verification source that is not the contractor's own word, and a refresh cycle.