Brazil is the fourth country in the world ranking of accidents with fatal victims and the fifteenth in relation to other accidents at work, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO). If companies are forced to pay higher rates by law for accidents, the worker, in addition to being able to afford life, is also to blame. It is common for leadership to relate the occurrence of an accident to unsafe worker behavior. This view is to some extent fueled by a literature that emphasizes employee responsibility by justifying accidents through categories such as human error, unsafe act, among others. This research seeks to contribute to the study of the causes of occupational accidents, examining how the issue of responsibility is described by those who manage work safety. From an ethnomethodological perspective, we intend to identify which common-sense conceptions support the explanations they present. The corpus consists of interviews with professionals whose hierarchical position is closest to the top of the pyramid and deal with workers who carry out activities with imminent risk. The results indicate, on the one hand, the persistence of the concept of an unsafe act, making the worker responsible, based on explanations that reinforce issues such as agency, knowledge and even intention to cause the accident. On the other hand, the results also show explanations that point to the responsibility of the company, which is not always assumed in cases of accidents. As for those involved in the management of work safety, culturally based explanations serve to reassure them, since the culture of the company and the worker precludes any effective action. Given these results, it turns out that, in practice, the tendency is to seek guilty and not to ascertain the responsibility of all in the occurrence of accidents.