Reporting culture
Near-miss underreporting
You ask for near misses, you get a handful a year, and you suspect that number is not describing the operation.
What the record usually shows
- A near-miss count, usually small, and usually stable.
- A ratio to reportable incidents that looks reassuring.
- Reports concentrated among a few people who file everything.
What it hides
- That the count measures willingness to report rather than how often near misses happen.
- What happened after the last report — the strongest single influence on whether anyone files another.
- Whether the form itself is the obstacle, by asking injury questions of an event with no injury.
Which sheet surfaces it
What the file can’t see
It reads the silence rather than the counts — what the form has no way to record, and what the record therefore cannot tell you about events nobody filed. Underreporting is a culture and instrument problem before it is a data problem, so this is the sheet that speaks to it; the free instrument audit answers the same question without an export at all.
What to ask before you act
- Can anyone in your organization name a time somebody reported something unflattering and nothing bad happened?
- How long does a near-miss report take, compared with an injury report?
- When the count rises, has leadership already agreed that is good news?
These are questions, not findings. Whether any control changes anything is settled by what happens next, not by the analysis that suggested it.