Boss lies on incident report after workplace incident, blaming employee: 'Should I confront my boss about this?'

Brad Dickson • Managing Editor

Jun 14, 2024 6:00 PM EDT

Health and Safety is no joke—though often made into one by those seeking to display their machismo… Still, it's one of those weird things in workplace culture that is handled with complete polarity—depending on the organization you work for.

If you work for a "cowboy" small business owner whose organization's growth has far outpaced the professionalism of its structure, one where the owner is used to taking risks that place themselves in danger, relishing these moments with bravado, bragging about them for years afterward. They now fail to weigh their own appetite for risk with their responsibility as a manager, expecting their employees, with no stake in the company, to take the same risks that they do.

On the flip side, large corporate entities will treat every workplace incident with solemn certainty, ensuring that every incident is reported and investigated with "zero tolerance" policies for those who fail to or falsely report them. Whether intentionally or not, the gravitas that is placed on these incidents actually discourages their proper reporting (but don't you dare suggest that to them) as the cause for every incident must be rooted out, with something (or someone) needing to be blamed for each one. So, those writing the reports will alter the events just enough to ensure that a reason can be pinpointed but without finding themselves in the line of fire. After brutal hour-long grilling sessions with HR and company executives, the agreed-upon "cause" and the "solution" to ensure it never happens again will become the required topic of discussion for any ensuing "toolbox talks" and branch meetings in the foreseeable future.

That's probably what was happening when this worker realized that their boss had falsified information on the incident report that they had submitted detailing the events of an incident that had resulted in an injury for the worker. Instead of changing the incident to blame a faultless cause, the boss had lied and blamed the worker for not wearing the proper PPE that they had been wearing at the time of the incident. See below the worker's account of events that they shared with this popular online workplace community, followed by responses from readers of the original thread.