Field notes › Compliance
Spotting a dodgy ticket before it reaches site
Nobody wants to think their crew would hand over a fake ticket. In practice, outright forgery is the rarest problem you will meet. The common ones are duller and easier to miss: a photo of a card that expired last year, a screenshot cropped so the date is not visible, a licence for a class next to the one the job needs, or a document that belongs to somebody else entirely.
All four end the same way. Somebody is on site who should not be, and the paperwork in your file says otherwise.
Look at the date before anything else
It sounds too simple to be worth saying, and it is the single highest-yield check. An expired card photographs exactly as well as a current one, and a worker who genuinely forgot their renewal is not behaving suspiciously when they send it.
Whatever system you use, the expiry date belongs in a field, not in an image. If the only place the date exists is inside the photo, then nothing can remind you, nothing can block on it, and the check depends on a person remembering to squint at a thumbnail.
Check the class, not just the ticket
High risk work licences carry classes, and the difference between two of them is the difference between a legal operator and an incident. A licence is not a yes or a no, it is a yes for these specific things.
Your competency matrix should name the class the site actually requires, and the record you hold should name the class the worker actually has. If either one says just the licence type, you have built ambiguity into the check. The rules on classes are the regulator's and they vary by state, so confirm against them rather than an internal habit.
Match the name and the person
A certificate with a different name on it than the profile it is attached to happens more often than you would think, usually innocently: a worker sends a photo of a mate's card to show you what the ticket looks like, and it gets filed. Sometimes it is not innocent.
The check is trivial and worth doing every time: does the name on the document match the name on the profile, allowing for the fact that people use shortened first names and change surnames. If it does not, ask, and record the answer.
Cropping is a signal
A photo cropped tight around the qualification, with the edges of the card missing, is worth a second look. Usually it means someone was in a hurry with a bad camera. Occasionally it means the missing edge had a date on it.
Asking for the whole card, front and back where relevant, costs you one message and removes the ambiguity. Make it the standard request rather than an accusation aimed at one person.
Verify at the source where you can
Some qualifications can be checked against the issuing authority or a public register. Where that exists, use it, at least for the tickets that carry the most risk on your sites. It is slower than accepting a photo, and it is the only check that actually proves the document is real.
Where it does not exist, be honest in your own records about what you did: a sighted-and-verified state means someone in your office looked at the original or a clear copy and compared it to the profile. That is a real standard. It is not the same as source verification, and pretending otherwise leaves you defending a claim you cannot support.
Make the easy path the compliant one
Most bad records get into a system because the good path was inconvenient. If uploading a renewal means emailing the office and hoping, renewals arrive late and get filed in a hurry.
If a worker can photograph the new card on their phone, enter the expiry, and have it sit in a pending state until someone verifies it, you get earlier renewals and a clearer queue. The office's job becomes reviewing a short list rather than chasing a long one. That is what the certificates flow in the worker portal is for, and the certificates guide walks through the states.
And then let the system be the sceptic
The last piece is that none of these checks should depend on someone remembering them at 6am. Once the expiry is a date in a field and the requirement is attached to the site, the booking check does the remembering: an expired or missing ticket blocks the shift outright rather than raising a warning that a busy person will click past.
Diligence catches most of it. A rule that cannot be skipped catches the morning when diligence was busy.