What ISNetworld actually reviews on the safety side

The practical answer

Contractors usually arrive at ISN expecting an insurance check and find a safety-program audit instead. The insurance part is the easy half. The half that consumes weeks is RAVS — Review and Verification Services — where a reviewer reads your written programs against a checklist and sends them back for what's missing.

Here is what gets reviewed, in the order it tends to cause trouble.

Your statistics

These come first because they're objective and fast to check.

• OSHA 300A summaries, typically for the last three years.
• TRIR — Total Recordable Incident Rate, computed from recordable injuries against hours worked.
• DART — Days Away, Restricted, or Transferred, a subset of recordables weighted toward serious outcomes.
• EMR — Experience Modification Rate, issued by your workers' comp carrier or rating bureau. Many clients set a hard cap, commonly at or below 1.0.
• Citation history — OSHA enforcement actions, if any.

Your written programs — where submissions fail

RAVS reviewers work from a checklist of required elements, and a program that reads well to you can still be rejected for omitting one. The programs requested depend on the work you perform, but the recurring set includes hazard communication, lockout/tagout, fall protection, confined space entry, respiratory protection, PPE assessment, emergency action, and a written safety and health program tying it together.

The most common rejection reasons are structural rather than substantive: no named responsible person, no review or revision date, no employee training or acknowledgement procedure, no disciplinary policy, and generic template language that never names your company. Fix those four things before you submit and you avoid most re-review cycles.

Thresholds are set by the client, not by ISN

ISN collects and verifies; the hiring client decides what passes. One client may require an EMR at or under 1.0 and a TRIR under the industry average, another may accept higher rates with a written corrective action plan. That is why the same contractor can hold a passing status with one client and a failing one with another on the same day.

Before you spend money chasing a number, ask the specific client what their thresholds are. Contractors regularly over-invest against a standard nobody asked them to meet.

Timelines worth planning around

Budget more than you think for a first submission. Statistics can be filed quickly if your records are in order, but RAVS review is a queue with review cycles, and each rejection restarts the wait. Contractors who onboard smoothly are the ones who had current written programs before the client mandated the network — not the ones who wrote them under deadline.

The insurance half

Alongside the safety review, you'll be asked for certificates evidencing the limits and endorsements the client requires — additional insured status, waiver of subrogation, and primary and non-contributory wording being the usual three. The certificate face alone does not prove any of them; the endorsement pages behind it do, and that distinction is where compliance most often quietly fails.

That part is worth getting right regardless of which network you're in, because it's the part that determines whether a claim actually reaches the policy you thought you were protected by.