A labor inspector shows up unannounced and asks for the Internal Regulations, the Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment Matrix, and the minutes from the last Joint Health and Safety Committee meeting. If any of those documents doesn't exist, is outdated, or nobody knows where it's filed, the company is already in violation before the inspector finishes reviewing the rest.
That, in practice, is the question DS 44 answers: which risk management instruments a company in Chile must have, with what minimum content, and with what evidence that they're current and actually applied — not just written once and filed away.
From DS 40 to DS 44: what actually changed
Supreme Decree 40 governed for nearly four decades as the "Regulation on Occupational Risk Prevention." DS 44 isn't a cosmetic update: it reorganizes and tightens several of those instruments, and adds requirements DS 40 never spelled out with the same level of detail.
The changes with the biggest day-to-day impact:
Explicit deadlines between instruments. The Preventive Work Program must be ready within 30 days of having the IPER Matrix (art. 8). Under DS 40, that sequence wasn't bound as tightly in time.
Proof of delivery, not just existence. Informing a worker of job-specific risks (IRL, art. 15) is no longer satisfied by having the document — it now requires a signed record that each worker received it before starting work.
Traceability into the internal regulations. The RIOHS (art. 56) must reflect the company's actual data and carry the acknowledgments from SEREMI, the Labor Directorate, and the administering body — it is not a generic template downloaded and signed.
Who it applies to
DS 44 applies to every company with dependent employees in Chile, with no minimum size that exempts anyone. What does change by size and industry is the volume of instruments required: an 8-person company in a low-risk sector doesn't need the same level of deployment as a 200-person industrial site. But the obligation to have an IPER Matrix, a RIOHS, a Joint Committee (where headcount requires one), and an Emergency Plan is universal.
The companies with the most immediate exposure are the ones already inspected under DS 40 that assume "this is already handled" because a five-year-old internal regulation is still sitting in a folder. DS 44 doesn't automatically recognize those documents as current if they don't meet today's content and evidence requirements.
The eight instruments an inspector can ask for
Concretely, this is what a complete DS 44 management system should be able to show the moment it's requested — not reconstruct over the following days:
- IPER Matrix (art. 7) — hazard identification by task and risk level calculation. It's the source that feeds the IRL, the RIOHS, and the Preventive Work Program.
- IRL (art. 15) — individual risk report for the position, delivered and signed before work begins.
- RIOHS (art. 56) — the internal regulations themselves, with the corresponding acknowledgments.
- Preventive Work Program (art. 8) — annual planning of activities tied to identified risks.
- Emergency Plan (art. 19) — threats, roles, resources with expiration dates, and drill records.
- PPE Management (art. 13) — catalog, signed deliveries, and usage evaluation.
- Joint Health and Safety Committee (art. 23) — formation, minutes, and annual program, when headcount requires it.
- Accident investigation (Law 16.744) — case file using root-cause-tree methodology and the Committee's ruling.
The problem isn't not knowing what to do — it's not being able to prove it
Most companies that fail a DS 44 inspection don't fail because they didn't know the rules. The most common failure is having the instruments partially done, scattered across shared folders, emails, and paper, with none of them linked to the next one — the IPER Matrix doesn't connect to the Preventive Work Program, the IRL has no signature on record, nobody can show when the last drill happened.
A management system that chains these eight instruments together — where the IPER Matrix automatically feeds the rest, and every delivery is timestamped and signed — is the difference between answering an inspection in minutes or reconstructing months of history under pressure.
If you want to know where your company stands on these eight instruments, Constata's DS 44 diagnostic gives an immediate result by area, without asking for any contact details first.
