Labor Code 6317: the six-month clock runs from the violation, not the inspection

Employers who receive a Cal/OSHA citation tend to ask two questions in the wrong order. The first one asked is almost always "how much is the penalty." The one that should come first is whether the citation was issued in time at all.

The statute

Labor Code section 6317 says it in one sentence: "A citation or notice shall not be issued by the division more than six months after the occurrence of the violation."

Read the operative words. The clock runs from the occurrence of the violation. It does not run from the inspection, from the closing conference, from the date the file was assigned to a compliance officer, or from the date the Division finished its paperwork. An inspection opened in month five over conditions that existed in month one does not buy the Division another six months.

Why this gets missed

Because the inspection date is the date everyone has in front of them. It is on the correspondence, it is what the employer remembers, and it is what gets written on the top of the file. The occurrence date frequently is not documented anywhere in the employer's own records, which means that if nobody reconstructs it, the six months are measured from the wrong event and a time-barred citation is quietly paid.

Reconstructing it is ordinary document work: dated photographs, equipment service records, delivery and rental tickets, daily reports, sign-in sheets, subcontractor schedules, the maintenance log for the machine in question. In a continuing-condition case the Division will argue the violation continued into the six-month window, and sometimes that is right. But it is an argument that has to be made and supported, not assumed, and the employer is the party holding most of the documents that bear on it.

The other clock, running the other way

Section 6317 also governs when abatement time starts. The abatement period begins when the citation is received — by signed certified mail, or on the date of return to the post office if it goes unsigned, or on the date of direct delivery by Division staff. Not when it was mailed, and not when it was read.

So two periods are running from the moment a citation lands, in opposite directions: six months backward, in which the violation must have occurred for the citation to stand, and fifteen working days forward, in which an appeal must be filed. Employers routinely track the second and never look at the first.

What to do with it

Date the violation before you argue about the penalty. Pull the records that fix when the condition existed, and compare that date to the issuance date on the citation's face. If the gap is more than six months, that is a threshold defense to the citation itself, not a mitigation argument about the amount.

And file the appeal regardless while you work it out. Fifteen working days from receipt is short, late filing is excused only on good cause meaning circumstances beyond your control that could not reasonably have been anticipated, and no timeliness defense survives a missed appeal deadline.

Michael Karl McNeil, REP, RIH, EPP, QSD. This is general information about published California regulations, not legal advice, and the deadline printed on your own citation controls.