Australia's recent regulatory reforms represent a significant leap forward in how government agencies & registers share information on worker suitability. Across federal and state levels, we'll see impressive coordination to improve data accuracy, streamline information flows, and reduce information silos.
These reforms deserve recognition and they represent a genuine commitment to improving the safeguards across the care industry.
But there's still a problem. While agencies now talk to each other more effectively, a critical gap remains: how do employers access this information about worker suitability?
The improvements are real. Enhanced data sharing between government registers means information about criminal history and working with children checks will now flow between agencies, and with National Continuous Checking Capability, information will be updated more often. This improves data quality, upholds mutual recognition (banned in one, banned in all), and helps maintain more accurate up-to-date records.
For the organisations that actually employ these workers – disability providers, aged care organisations, childcare centres, and more – the experience remains frustratingly fragmented.
Working with Children Checks are managed through 8 different state registers creating a fragmented user experience for employers trying to verify worker suitability. Particularly when care organisations are managing hundreds or thousands of workers, and have turnover rates as high as 50%.
Add in other right to work checks like Visa Entitlements, Teachers licenses, professional registers, NDIS worker screening checks and other certificates, and you've got multiple different registers required to verify suitability just for the one worker.
And that's just hiring a worker.
Employers then have to manage the suitability of workers as they continue to be employed, which includes verifying their right-to-work credentials across multiple government registers.
The manual effort associated with verifying a workforce of thousands regularly is monumental.
And what happens if someone's status on their working with children check changes?
The different registers each have different notification methods, however these can often be unreliable and can take the form of an email, phone call, in-register pop up, or even a letter. In some states, individuals can even nominate themselves as their organisation, meaning their employer wouldn't receive a notification of a status change to their Working With Children Check.
Administrative overhead: HR teams can spend countless hours logging into multiple portals, tracking worker credentials across different systems, and manually reconciling or updating information. Time spent navigating portals is time that could be spent on delivering quality care.
Compliance risk: with information scatter across fragmented systems, it's easy for some things to slip through the cracks. Keeping on top of status changes and expiry dates is important when managing a care workforce.
System reliability: many of these portals can make the HR or compliance job more complex than it needs to be, taking time away from delivering quality care.
Scalability challenges: organisations operating across multiple states or growing rapidly find the administrative burden multiples exponentially. What might work for one or two locations, quickly becomes unmanageable at a greater scale.
The government is strengthening the systems that manage and house the data on worker suitability, but infrastructure is needed for employers to efficiently and reliability verify the suitability, without manually navigating a maze of portals.
Oho provides continuous verification, monitoring and notification of right-to-work compliance checks for the care and community sector, including Working With Children Checks across all Australian jurisdictions. Oho plugs into 23+ government registers to provide near real-time information on worker suitability.
.webp)
