What DS 44 demands and what Law 21.719 regulates
Two Chilean rules published four and a half months apart that land on the same piece of paper: the record of a field inspection.
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Chilean rules published in 2024 that land on the same field record.
Between July 2024 and December 2024 Chile published two rules that are almost never cited together and that nevertheless land on the same object: the record left by a field inspection. One obliges you to produce it and keep it. The other regulates what can be done with the personal data that record contains. This note is a summary of what each one says, with the official source, and it is not legal advice.
DS 44: preventive management gets documented
Supreme Decree No. 44 of the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, which approves the Regulation on preventive management of occupational risks, was published in the Official Gazette on 27 July 2024 and came into force on 1 February 2025. It replaces two decrees from 1969: DS 40, on occupational risk prevention, and DS 54, on joint committees.
What changes for people working in the field is not so much the catalogue of obligations as the fact that now you have to be able to show them. The Labour Directorate lists the instruments the employer must have: the hazard identification and risk assessment matrix, the preventive work programme, the workplace risk maps, the internal regulations, the occupational health and safety management system and the records of information and training of workers.
On the enforcement side, the Occupational Safety Institute publishes a Single Inspection Form tied to the decree, which standardises what is checked and how. That is the part we get asked about most and the one least discussed: the rule does not only ask you to do preventive management, it asks you to leave evidence of having done it in a form somebody external can review without being present.
A record that lives in a notebook, in a WhatsApp group and in three shared folders meets the first part and not the second.
Law 21.719: and that record holds personal data
Law No. 21.719, which regulates the protection and processing of personal data and creates the Personal Data Protection Agency, was published on 13 December 2024 and comes fully into force twenty-four months after publication, on 1 December 2026: less than half a year from when we write this.
It replaces the framework of Law 19.628, from 1999, which had symbolic penalties and no enforcement body. The new law creates an agency with powers to inspect and sanction, strengthens the rights of access, rectification, erasure and objection, adds portability, obliges companies to notify security breaches and raises the ceiling on fines to 20,000 UTM.
It is worth looking at an inspection record with that law beside it. A field form usually carries the name and national ID of whoever inspects and whoever accompanies them, their signature, the exact time, the coordinate where that person was and, very often, photographs with people in them. All of that is personal data. The coordinate with a time is, in addition, a record of where a worker was at a given moment.
AI-generated image from our own references.
Both at once
Put together, the two rules ask for things that hold up well if the record is built for them, and badly if it is not.
DS 44 asks you to keep. Law 21.719 asks you to be able to say what is kept, for what purpose, for how long, who has access and what happens when somebody exercises a right over their data. The two demands only contradict each other when the record is a pile of unstructured files: then keeping everything forever is the cheap way to meet the first and the sure way to fail the second.
Traceability —who filled in the field, when, against which version of the form, from where— is what gives both questions an answer. It works on the day of the inspection and it works on the day somebody asks what information about them is stored. It is the same data.
What this note does not say
We do not say which article obliges exactly what, or for how many years each record must be kept. The text of DS 44 is linked above and is the only source that should be cited for that; the administering bodies of Law 16.744 publish guides, and a labour lawyer will say what we do not.
Nor do we yet know how the Personal Data Protection Agency will enforce in practice, because at the date of this note it is not yet operating. When it does, this summary will need a second part.
Sources
Supreme Decree No. 44 of 2024, Ministry of Labour and Social Security, published 27 July 2024, in force since 1 February 2025: text at Ley Chile (BCN).
Labour Directorate, page on Supreme Decree No. 44 and the preventive management instruments: dt.gob.cl.
Occupational Safety Institute, Decree 44 and the Single Inspection Form: isl.gob.cl.
Law No. 21.719, published 13 December 2024: text at Ley Chile (BCN).