When a Site Changes Ownership Mid-Year, the OSHA 300 Log Doesn't Reset — It Splits

A plant sells mid-year. The acquiring company's EHS team inherits a facility, an org chart, and — if anyone thought to ask for it — a partial OSHA 300 log covering the months before the deal closed. Just as often, nobody asks for it, because recordkeeping continuity isn't the kind of thing that shows up on a due diligence checklist next to environmental liabilities and pending litigation. It gets treated as an IT handoff problem: whoever has the spreadsheet, has the log.

That's not how 29 CFR 1904.34, "Change in Business Ownership," actually allocates the obligation, and the gap between the two mental models is where multi-site operators get exposed — not at the moment of acquisition, but months later, when an inspection or a data request asks for a complete year's recordkeeping history for an establishment that changed hands partway through it.

The obligation follows the calendar date, not the deal date's paperwork

Under 1904.34, the seller is responsible for recording and reporting every work-related injury and illness that occurred at that establishment up through the date ownership changed. The buyer becomes responsible from that date forward. This sounds obvious stated plainly, but it means the log for that establishment's calendar year is, by design, a document with two authors and no single owner unless someone deliberately makes it one. A portfolio company acquiring six facilities in a single quarter is inheriting six logs in that split state, each with a different transition date, each requiring the acquired entity to either receive a properly completed log from the seller or reconstruct one from source records — first reports of injury, medical files, whatever exists.

The retention obligation under 1904.33 doesn't pause for the sale either. The five-year retention clock that started when an entry was made keeps running against the establishment, not against whichever corporate entity happens to hold title to it that year. An acquirer that doesn't secure the pre-acquisition portion of the log isn't just missing paperwork — it's the entity now unable to produce records that a federal standard says must exist for that facility, even though it didn't generate the underlying injuries.

Why this is a portfolio problem and not a single-site inconvenience

At one facility, a missing three months of pre-acquisition recordkeeping is an awkward gap to explain if OSHA ever asks. Across a portfolio doing routine acquisitions and divestitures, it's a structural pattern: the M&A process has a reliable rhythm — letter of intent, diligence, close, integration — and OSHA recordkeeping transfer isn't a checkpoint in any standard version of that rhythm. Environmental liabilities get a Phase I assessment. Litigation gets a disclosure schedule. The 300 log gets whatever happens to survive the handoff between the departing site safety coordinator and whoever corporate assigns to onboard the new facility, which in practice ranges from a clean file transfer to nothing at all.

The asymmetry that makes this worse: the seller's exposure ends at the transition date and their incentive to hand over a complete, accurate log declines accordingly, especially if the facility had a rough injury year they'd rather not have to certify on their way out. The buyer's exposure is open-ended and starts the moment they take title, whether or not they received anything usable. A clause in the purchase agreement requiring delivery of complete recordkeeping records for the current and prior years closes most of this gap, but that clause has to be negotiated before close — it isn't something recordkeeping obligations under Part 1904 create automatically, and it isn't something EHS typically gets a seat at the table to request unless the function is looped into diligence deliberately.

Divestiture has the same trap, pointed the other direction

Sell a site and the obligation to be able to produce that establishment's pre-sale records for five years doesn't transfer with the deed — it stays with the seller for the portion of the year they owned it. An enterprise that treats a divested facility as fully off the books the day the sale closes may find, a year or two later, that it's the party OSHA or a litigant expects to produce the pre-sale 300 log, the 301 incident reports, and the annual summary for a facility it no longer operates and may have no remaining relationship with. If the records lived on that site's local server and left with the buyer, or were purged during transition cleanup because nobody flagged them as a five-year retention item independent of the sale, the obligation exists with nothing behind it.

This is the piece that's easy to miss in the after-action review following any divestiture: recordkeeping retention is an obligation on the corporate entity for the period it held the establishment, and it doesn't get satisfied by the buyer's copy existing somewhere, because the seller has no guaranteed access to that copy once the relationship ends.

The gap rarely surfaces at the moment it's created

Part of why this obligation gets skipped is that nothing forces the question at closing. A missing environmental report or an undisclosed pending citation shows up during diligence because someone is actively looking for it. A recordkeeping gap doesn't announce itself until an inspection lands at that specific facility, or a workers' compensation dispute reaches back into a prior year's classification decisions, or a plaintiff's attorney in an injury lawsuit requests the establishment's complete recordkeeping history going back five years. By the time any of those events happens, the transition team that closed the deal has moved on, the site-level employees who might remember what was or wasn't transferred may no longer work there, and reconstructing the record from scratch is far harder than it would have been to simply request the complete file at close.

That lag is what makes the obligation easy to underweight during the deal itself. Nothing about 1904.34 imposes an immediate, visible cost on the day of transfer — the cost shows up later, attached to whichever entity happens to be asked, and by then the decision that created the gap is long past being anyone's active concern.

What this changes about how acquisitions and divestitures should run

The fix isn't a new compliance program — it's treating OSHA recordkeeping continuity as a standard diligence and integration line item, the same way environmental and safety liability disclosures already are for most deals of any size. On the buy side, that means requesting the current and prior year's 300 log, 300A summary, and underlying 301 forms for each acquired establishment before close, and flagging any gap in what's produced as an integration task with an owner and a deadline, not an assumption that it'll surface later if needed. On the sell side, it means retaining a complete copy of the pre-transition records independent of whatever the buyer receives, since the retention clock under 1904.33 is running against the seller for exactly the period they're being asked to prove.

Neither step requires new technology or a new policy. It requires whoever owns the M&A process to know that 1904.34 exists and applies automatically, deal by deal, whether or not anyone remembers to act on it — and to build the handoff into the transaction checklist rather than leaving it to whichever site-level employee happens to still be there when the ownership changes.