The Contractor Blind Spot Putting Hiring Clients at Risk

Here's a stat worth sitting with:

Contractors account for 85% of work fatalities in oil and gas extraction (2014-2019).

Not employees—contractors.

Drilling crews. Well servicing teams. Specialty trade and support contractors.
The people hired to perform safety-critical work on active job sites every day.*

A policy doesn’t guarantee protection.

Most hiring clients have solid drug and alcohol testing programs for their own employees. Many extend those expectations to contractors through signed policy agreements.

But signing a policy isn't the same as following it.

Without a system to verify what’s actually happening in the field, gaps form. Risk grows. And the hiring client is left exposed.

What one audit revealed:

One hiring client we work with uncovered this firsthand.

They’d had contractor drug testing requirements on paper for years, but had never taken the extra step to confirm compliance.

When they recently implemented a continuous monitoring program, here’s what surfaced:

1 in 4 contractors had critical testing failures.

(non-compliant tests, random testing gaps, missing DOT history checks)

11% had administrative oversight gaps.

(missing historical testing data, unverified rosters, incomplete supervisor training, etc.)

Altogether, roughly 40% of their contractor base was operating outside the testing standards they’d agreed to.

Policy ≠ Program

A contractor drug testing policy without accountability isn’t a safety program—it’s an assumption.

It’s a hidden liability that, when left unchecked in high-risk environments, can lead to costly exposure.

* Source: NIOSH Fatalities in Oil and Gas Extraction (FOG) database. This figure reflects the combined fatalities among drilling contractors, servicing contractors, and other non-operator contractor groups performing upstream extraction work.

Citation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Fatalities in the Oil and Gas Extraction Industry (FOG), U.S. Oil and Gas Program. In: Worker Health Charts (WHC). # of Fatalities for Fatalities by Industry Sector, All, 2014 - 2019, at https://wwwn.cdc.gov/NIOSH-WHC/chart/FOG-FOG?T=NA&V=C&D=ALL&S=N00&chk_codes=False. Cincinnati, OH: US Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, NIOSH. Accessed January 22, 2026.