Questions Most Frequently Asked About Abatement Verification (29 CFR 1903.19). (1)?What is abatement? Abatement is the correction of the safety or health hazard/violation that led to an OSHA citation. (2) What is abatement verification? It is the process by which an employer informs OSHA, affected employees, and their representatives that a hazard cited by OSHA has been corrected. (3) When does the regulation affect an employer? When the employer receives an OSHA citation from an inspection that began after May 30, 1997. (4) How does the regulation apply to an employer in a state with an OSHA-approved State Plan? Each of the 25 states with OSHA-approved State Plans must adopt its own abatement verification regulations or other equivalent mechanism that can be enforced in a manner as effective as OSHA's. Contact the State Plan agency for specific requirements. See pages 11 and 25 of this guide for more information. (5) Whose requirements do I follow if my home office is in one state and the work site where I was cited is in another? The state where your employees were working at the time of the inspection and citation. (6) How does the regulation differ from OSHA's previous procedures for abatement verification? The new regulation provides a uniform system for documenting the correction of cited hazards, and the amount of documentation required now increases as the seriousness of the violation increases. The previous procedures did not use the sliding scale approach to abatement verification. (7) Does the new rule reduce paperwork? Yes. When hazards are abated during an inspection, no abatement certification is required. Also, documentation or proof of abatement is not required for minor (other-than-serious) violations or for most violations classified as serious. (8) How will employees benefit from the new rule? Employees and their representatives now will be informed of the abatement activities taken by their employers. Movable equipment that is cited must be tagged to alert employees to the danger posed by the equipment. (9) By regulation, how long after transmission of an abatement document to OSHA must an employer retain the submitted document? Three working days, the required employee-notification period. (10) What effect does the regulation have on an employer's right to contest a citation? None. The regulation does not restrict the right of employers, employees, and employee representatives to contest citation item(s). (11) When do abatement verification obligations begin if an employer contests a citation? Until a contested item is resolved, the abatement verification process is delayed for that item. See more from topic source: https://www.osha.gov/html/a-z-index.html