DOSH Inspections: What Inspectors Check, and What a Notice Actually Costs

Before 1 June 2024, OSHA 1994 applied only to the industries listed in its First Schedule. If your operation fell outside that list, a DOSH officer was unlikely to appear and the Act was somebody else's problem.

The Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 removed that restriction. The Act now applies to every place of work in Malaysia, with narrow exemptions for domestic employment, the armed forces and work on board ships governed by the Merchant Shipping Ordinance. A great many workplaces are now fully within scope, have no inspection history, and no particular reason to expect one — right up until an officer arrives.

What an inspector can do

Part XI of the Act gives officers powers of entry, inspection, examination and seizure. No advance notice is required. An inspection may be routine, prompted by a complaint, or triggered by an accident you notified under NADOPOD.

Two things follow that employers sometimes miss. An employer has a statutory duty to assist an officer carrying out an inspection. And obstructing an inspection is an offence in its own right, separate from whatever the officer finds.

What they look at

Inspectors work from the duties the Act actually imposes, so the checklist is not mysterious:

• The written safety and health policy required by section 16, signed and current rather than drafted years ago and filed.
• Risk assessment records. Since the amendment, assessing risk is an express statutory duty, and HIRARC is the methodology DOSH expects. Coverage across all work activities matters more than the format.
• Appointments. An OSH Coordinator is required under section 29A where five or more employees are engaged and no safety and health officer is required. A safety and health committee is required under section 30 at forty or more.
• Certificates of Fitness for plant that requires them — boilers, pressure vessels and lifting machinery — together with maintenance records and the registration number displayed on the plant.
• Incident records. Notifications made under NADOPOD 2004 and the JKKP 8 register, which must be retained five years. A clean year still requires a nil return.
• Chemical management — register, accessible safety data sheets, labelling, storage segregation, and health surveillance where it applies.
• The floor itself. Guarding, isolation, access and egress, emergency arrangements, and whether operators can explain the controls they work under.

That last point is the one documentation cannot solve. Inspectors talk to operators, and a supervisor who cannot describe the permit system is more damaging than a missing form.

The two notices

Section 48 provides for two instruments, and the difference between them is the difference between a deadline and a shutdown.

An improvement notice identifies a contravention and requires it to be remedied within a specified period. Operations continue.

A prohibition notice is served where an activity is likely to cause immediate danger to life or property. It prohibits use or operation of the place of work, plant, substance or process until the danger is removed and the defect made good to the officer's satisfaction. Operations stop.

The part almost everyone gets wrong

Section 49(1) states that a person to whom an improvement or prohibition notice is issued must comply with it notwithstanding that an appeal against its issuance has been lodged.

Appealing does not buy you time. It does not suspend the notice. We have seen published guidance stating the opposite — that an improvement notice need not be complied with while an appeal is pending — and that is simply not what the Act says. Acting on that advice converts a compliance problem into a prosecution.

What non-compliance costs

Section 49(2), as amended by the 2022 Act, provides for a fine not exceeding RM500,000, imprisonment not exceeding two years, or both — plus a further fine of RM2,000 for each day the offence continues.

Before the amendment those figures were RM50,000 and RM500 per day. The daily accumulation is the part that hurts: a notice left unresolved for three months carries a continuing exposure entirely separate from the headline fine.

And under section 52, where a company commits an offence, directors, managers and others concerned in its management can be held personally liable, subject to a due diligence defence.

The appeal route

If you consider a notice wrong, section 50 sets out the path:

• Thirty days from the date of the notice to appeal to the Director General, who may confirm, revoke or vary it.
• A further thirty days to appeal that decision to an appeal committee appointed by the Minister.
• Where the notice was issued by the Director General or Deputy Director General, the appeal goes directly to the appeal committee.

The appeal committee's decision is final and conclusive and cannot be questioned in any court. So the appeal is worth taking seriously, and it is worth taking early — while complying in the meantime.

If you have never been inspected

The honest position for a workplace newly in scope is that the gap is unlikely to be one item. Policy, risk assessments, appointments, plant certification and incident records tend to be missing together, because none of them were required before.

That is a project rather than a panic. But it is considerably cheaper to do it on your own schedule than under a notice with a deadline attached — and an improvement notice with a thirty-day remedy period is not enough time to build a risk assessment programme from nothing.

How ProSafe helps

An EHS audit gives you the same findings an inspector would, on your terms and with the report belonging to you. We work with manufacturers across Johor Bahru, Pasir Gudang, Senai and Kulai — and if a notice has already been served, the priority is understanding exactly what it requires and by when.

Sources: Occupational Safety and Health Act 1994 (Act 514), sections 16, 29A, 30, 39–52; Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 (Act A1648), in force 1 June 2024.