Your screening policy fails on the receipt.
Every screening policy in Canadian sport says some version of the same thing. High-risk adults provide an enhanced police check. Some provide a vulnerable sector check. Renew every three years.
None of them say what to do when the document that arrives is not the document the policy asked for.
What volunteers actually upload.
We read roughly a thousand screening documents from one association's historical files. Here is what showed up where a police check should have been:
- The payment receipt for the check
- The "application submitted" confirmation page
- A referral letter asking the person to attend for fingerprints
- A driver's licence
- A photo of a laptop screen showing the result, taken at an angle
- An encrypted police PDF that opens in a viewer and fails in every other program
The receipt is the one that matters. It looks official. It carries the police service name. It has the person's name on it. A tired volunteer reviewing 300 files in September will accept it, and the spreadsheet will say compliant for three years.
A receipt is proof someone paid. It is not proof of anything else.
The same mistake on training.
Coaching cards cause the same problem. The card shows a coach's number. It does not always show the training the policy requires. The right document is the transcript, which lives a few clicks deep in a portal most coaches have never opened.
The most common genuine mistake we saw was not fraud. It was a different safeguarding course with a similar name.
What to do about it.
Write the receipt into your policy. Say plainly that receipts, payment confirmations and application pages are never results. Then write the rejection notice so it tells the person exactly what to upload instead and where to click to get it.
"Document rejected" gets a complaint to a board member. "You uploaded your payment receipt. Upload the result letter the police service sent you when the check was finished" gets the right document back.
Or let the engine do it. Cleared names the receipt as its own verdict, because it is the most common wrong upload there is. Build your screening checklist