There are about 250,000 workplaces in Finland subject to monitoring by the occupational safety and health authorities. We aim to target our inspections so that our monitoring will be as effective as possible. About half of our inspections concern workplaces with fewer than ten employees.

In 2021, we performed about 20,500 workplace inspections initiated by authorities or customers. We issued over 34,000 written advices and about 5,000 improvement notices on matters that should be corrected at workplaces. We submit an inspection report to the workplace in question no later than one month after the end of the inspection, or when the Occupational Safety and Health Division has access to all the necessary material.

We received about 37,000 communications from customers in 2021. More than 2,000 of these communications led to an occupational safety and health inspection.

On about 330 occasions we were obliged to use coercive measures: prohibitions on use, various obligatory decisions and fines for neglect of contractor’s liability.

We filed about 400 reports with the police concerning aggravated occupational safety and health offences, and we issued 764 statements to the police and prosecutors. We also investigated over 1,100 occupational accidents in 2021.

For more information, please see the Annual Reports of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Matters inspected in occupational safety and health inspections in 2017–2020

The data published as a result of a joint project between the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and the occupational safety and health authority includes inspections between 2017–2020. The data includes nearly 90,000 workplace inspections, nearly 38,000 inspected employers and more than 63,000 workplaces. It enables comparison of the number of occupational safety and health inspections per sector and subject matter, the indicators provide information on the lawfulness of the inspected matters.

For more information, please see Finnish Institute of Occupational Health's Work-Life Knowledge service.