It's common to find companies that have Internal Regulations on Order, Hygiene and Safety (RIOHS) — printed, bound, even posted on a board in the cafeteria — that were never actually sent to the Labor Directorate, the regional Health Authority (SEREMI), or the Law 16.744 administering body. A document without those acknowledgments isn't a valid RIOHS under DS 44 — it's a draft dressed up as a regulation.
Article 56 of DS 44 doesn't just require the RIOHS to exist: it requires specific minimum content and evidence that it was submitted to the three agencies that need to be on record with it.
The acknowledgments almost nobody keeps in order
The RIOHS must be sent to:
- The Labor Directorate, which can demand changes if it finds clauses that violate labor rights.
- The relevant regional Health Authority (SEREMI), which reviews the hygiene and safety content.
- The Law 16.744 administering body (mutual insurer or ISL), which typically also requires it as a condition for maintaining the company's contribution rate.
In practice, most companies send the regulations once, at some point in the past, and never do it again when they update it. The result is a RIOHS that's "current" in the company's own files while, in the records of those three agencies, it corresponds to a version from years earlier — with data, positions, or procedures that no longer exist.
Minimum content DS 44 requires
Beyond the general labor clauses (working hours, pay, obligations and prohibitions), DS 44 focuses on the hygiene and safety section, which must include at minimum:
- Specific obligations and prohibitions related to risk prevention — not generic ones.
- The claims procedure for a workplace accident or occupational illness, with the actual deadlines set by Law 16.744.
- References to the instruments the company should already have in place: who's responsible for the Joint Committee, how the accident investigation procedure works, what the channel is for reporting unsafe conditions.
- The penalties applicable for violating safety rules, within what the Labor Code allows.
A frequent mistake is drafting this section with generic language copied from a template, without connecting it to the actual risks identified in the company's IPER Matrix. A RIOHS that mentions "handling hazardous substances" at an administrative services company, or says nothing about working at height at a construction company, reveals that the document didn't come from a real assessment.
When it needs to be updated
The RIOHS isn't static. It must be reviewed and, where applicable, resubmitted to the three agencies when:
- The risks identified in the IPER Matrix change.
- The organizational structure or the people responsible for prevention change.
- A regulatory change directly affects its content — like the shift from DS 40 to DS 44 itself.
- A long period has passed without review, even if nothing obviously changed — an inspector can question why nobody reviewed it in years.
Traceability is half of compliance
Having the right content is only half the problem. The other half is being able to show, the moment it's requested, the date of the latest version, the record of all three acknowledgments, and evidence that workers know the current regulations — not an earlier version.
A system that generates the RIOHS from the company's real data and automatically keeps the version and acknowledgment history avoids the most common violation scenario: it's not that the regulations are poorly written, it's that nobody can prove which of the four versions floating around is actually the current one.
Constata's RIOHS module generates the regulations from the company's real data and logs the acknowledgments from all three agencies. Check out the rest of the modules or start with the DS 44 diagnostic.
