Agency Pushes Plan To Remove Merit, Corporate Levels From Voluntary Programs

OSHA officials are pressing forward on a plan, laid out in the agency's fiscal 2013 budget request, to remove the Merit and Corporate levels of participation from Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP), following an internal work group's report last year that called for OSHA to consider discontinuing the special levels. An OSHA official says the agency already has or will move ahead with changes sought by the work group, which was spearheaded by a group of regional administrators and area directors studying the effectiveness of VPP. The VPP report, which is dated November 2011 but was only recent