The Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 changed something fundamental about workplace safety in Malaysia: it made individual directors and managers personally responsible for safety failures, not just the company they lead.
Under the original OSHA 1994 framework, safety obligations fell primarily on employers as corporate entities. OSHA 2022 Malaysia removed that insulation. The amendment introduced provisions that allow individual officers — directors, managers, and persons exercising control over the workplace — to be held personally liable for safety offences. This is not a procedural technicality. It changes the risk calculation for every member of a company’s board and senior management.
Most boards in Malaysia have not yet had this conversation.
What Changed Under OSHA 2022 Malaysia
The key shift in OSHA 2022 Malaysia is the extension of accountability beyond the corporate entity to the individuals who control it. The amendment creates specific obligations for officers of a body corporate.
When a safety offence is committed by a company, the new provisions allow the prosecution to extend to any director, manager, secretary, or officer of that company who either consented to the offence, connived in it, or failed to prevent it through negligence.
The phrase “negligence” is critical. A director does not need to have actively participated in a safety failure to be exposed. If a failure occurred and the director’s oversight was insufficient, personal liability can follow.
For further reference, the full text of the Occupational Safety and Health (Amendment) Act 2022 is available through the DOSH Malaysia official website.
Exposure 1 — No Knowledge of the Company’s Risk Profile
The first category of exposure is ignorance — and under OSHA 2022 Malaysia, ignorance is not a defence.
A director who has never reviewed the company’s HIRARC documents, never received a briefing on major hazard exposures, never asked what the highest-risk operations in the business are — has failed to exercise adequate oversight. When a safety failure occurs in an operation that the director was never briefed on, the question is not “did the director know?” It is “should the director have known?”
If the answer is yes — and in most cases involving significant operational risks, it will be — personal liability follows.
The minimum level of director engagement that protects against this exposure includes: receiving a summary of the company’s major hazard risk profile at board level, reviewing incident investigation outcomes as a standing agenda item, and understanding which operations carry the highest consequence if control is lost.
Exposure 2 — Delegating Safety and Walking Away
The second exposure category is delegation without follow-through.
Many directors believe that appointing an HSE Manager and giving them authority transfers the director’s obligation. Under OSHA 2022 Malaysia, this belief is incorrect.
The obligation to ensure a safe workplace cannot be fully delegated. A director who says “I gave HSE the responsibility” and subsequently has no involvement in safety governance — no review of performance, no engagement with serious incidents, no oversight of corrective action progress — has not discharged their duty. They have simply created a gap between their obligation and their oversight.
Effective delegation under OSHA 2022 Malaysia requires not just the appointment of competent personnel, but ongoing documented evidence that the director received reports, reviewed outcomes, and took action where required.
Exposure 3 — No Documented Evidence of Oversight
The third and most practically important exposure is the absence of records.
DOSH investigations do not only examine what happened. They examine what the company — and its officers — did to prevent it. When a serious incident occurs and DOSH investigators seek evidence of board-level safety governance, companies that cannot produce records are in a significantly more exposed position than those that can.
The records that provide protection include: board meeting minutes with safety as a standing agenda item, management review records from the safety committee, documented receipt and review of incident investigation reports, and corrective action tracking with evidence of closure.
These records do not need to demonstrate perfect safety performance. They need to demonstrate that safety was being actively governed — that directors were receiving information, asking questions, and holding management accountable for outcomes.
What Boards Should Do Now
The first step is a simple one: schedule a board-level briefing on the company’s safety obligations under OSHA 2022 Malaysia. This briefing should cover the major hazard risk profile of the business, the current state of HSE management systems, and the specific obligations that now sit at the individual director level.
The second step is to ensure that safety appears as a standing agenda item in board meetings — not as a one-page statistics report, but as a substantive discussion of risk, performance, and corrective action.
The third step is to create a paper trail. Every engagement with safety information at board level should be documented. Every question asked. Every directive given. Every report received and acknowledged.
OSHA 2022 Malaysia made safety a board-level issue. The directors who understand this earliest, and build the governance habits to match, are the ones who will be in the best position when DOSH comes to ask what was done to prevent the next incident.
Is your management team clear on their obligations under OSHA 2022 Malaysia? Cikgu Barrier’s OSH Obligations for Management program is designed specifically for directors, HR professionals, and senior managers — covering legal duties, personal liability, and practical governance under the amended legislation. Contact us to discuss in-house delivery for your leadership team.