Notifiable Incident Under-Reporting Risk in Australia

What it is

Every WHS jurisdiction requires a person conducting a business or undertaking to notify the regulator immediately after becoming aware of a notifiable incident. The lists of what counts sit in the model Work Health and Safety Act. The state entries in this knowledge base set out each list.

This entry is about the failure to make the call. Under-reporting is the most common WHS breach on residential sites. It is almost never deliberate.

Safe Work Australia does not receive notifications. It writes the model law. The notification goes to the state regulator: SafeWork NSW, Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, WorkSafe Victoria and so on.

Why it does not get reported

The supervisor makes a judgement call. The worker walked away, the ambulance was not needed and the call feels like an overreaction. Seriousness is not the supervisor's test to apply. The Act's is.

The injury is written up as first aid. A hand laceration gets a dressing, goes in the first aid book and never reaches the office. The same worker is admitted as an in-patient two days later.

The near miss is not recognised. Scaffold collapses at 6am before anyone is on it. Nobody is hurt so nobody notifies. A dangerous incident is notifiable whether or not anyone was hurt.

The worker belongs to a subbie. The builder assumes it is the subbie's problem.

Every PCBU with control must notify

There is no single duty holder. The duty falls on every PCBU with management or control of the workplace where the incident happened. On a residential site with a head contractor and six trades, an incident involving a plumber's apprentice is notifiable by the plumbing company as the employing PCBU and by the head contractor as the PCBU controlling the site.

"The subbie said they reported it" is not a defence. Each duty holder is assessed separately. If you are not on the notification, you did not notify.

Two notifications of the same incident is not an offence. One missing notification is.

The site you cannot touch

After a notifiable incident, the site must not be disturbed until an inspector arrives or the regulator directs otherwise. The exceptions are narrow: helping an injured person, removing a deceased person, making the site safe or acting under police direction.

Cleaning up before the inspector arrives is a separate offence from failing to notify. SafeWork NSW has warned about a rising trend in both.

Records, penalties and delayed discovery

A record of every notifiable incident must be kept for at least 5 years from the date it was notified. The completed notification form is the record.

In NSW the penalty for failing to notify runs to $50,000 for a body corporate and $10,000 for an individual. That is the cheap part.

The expensive part is delayed discovery. The regulator usually finds out anyway, through a workers compensation claim lodged weeks later, a doctor's report or the worker's own call. At that point the failure to notify stops being a technical breach. It becomes evidence. It colours the prosecution decision, the sentencing submission on remorse and the insurer's view at renewal.

The December 2025 changes

In December 2025 Safe Work Australia published amendments to the model WHS Act that widen notification well past the old lists. The trigger becomes a "relevant occurrence" and it adds notifiable extended absences, being absences of 15 or more consecutive days attributable to a work-related injury or illness, plus notifiable suicides including attempted suicides, plus violent incidents that expose a person to serious psychological harm.

The timeframes differ. Incidents and suicides are notified immediately. Extended absences are notified within 14 days.

These are model provisions. They bite in a state only once that state adopts them. Victoria is not a model WHS jurisdiction at all. A builder working across borders cannot run one notification rule.

The signal and what to do

• An incident register entry with no regulator notification reference against it
• A workers compensation claim on file with no matching notification
• A first aid book entry describing an injury that needed a hospital
• A subcontractor's incident where the builder's only record is "reported by subbie"

Train supervisors to notify on doubt, not on certainty. Put the regulator's number on the site board. Notify independently every time, whatever the subbie says. Keep the notification reference against the incident record for 5 years.