# Koora, Full Platform Context

> Koora is Australia's Career Passport platform for the care sector. Workers own one verified, portable profile covering identity and work rights, police certificate status, Working With Children Check, NDIS Worker Screening, AHPRA registration, qualifications, first aid and references. Providers verify the entire workforce in one place, screen against four Australian government ban registers, track every credential expiry, and get role-aware compliance signals across aged care, disability (NDIS) and childcare. Free forever for workers. Annual plans for providers. Kooka AI is Koora's embedded compliance and career assistant, grounded in Australian care sector regulation.

## 1. About Koora

Koora exists because care sector onboarding is broken. Every worker re-uploads the same identity, police certificate, Working With Children Check, NDIS Worker Screening, AHPRA registration and first aid certificate to every new employer. Every provider spends hours chasing paperwork, calling registers, remembering to recheck expiries, and trying to keep pace with the Aged Care Act 2024, Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, NDIS Practice Standards, NDIS Code of Conduct, National Quality Framework and eight state and territory Working With Children Check regimes.

Koora replaces that with a single portable Career Passport for workers and a live workforce compliance view for providers. Workers verify once and carry their Career Passport with them. Providers see the entire workforce at a glance, with credential tiers, expiries, and continuous ban register screening.

Koora serves the three major care sectors in Australia: aged care (including residential and home care), disability (NDIS registered and unregistered providers), and childcare (early childhood education and care). It is designed for the regulatory realities of each sector, not bolted on to a generic HR tool.

## 2. The Career Passport

A Career Passport is a worker's portable, verified professional identity. It is free forever for the worker, and the worker owns it. Workers take their Career Passport with them between employers, agencies, and sectors.

A Career Passport contains:

- Legal identity and work rights, verified through the Australian Document Verification Service (DVS) and, where relevant, Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO).
- Police certificate status: Koora accepts current National Police Certificates (NPCs) issued by ACIC-accredited agencies, tracks issue and expiry dates, and flags certificates older than three years (the aged care threshold).
- Working With Children Check for each state or territory of clearance, with state-specific terminology and validity periods.
- NDIS Worker Screening Check status (where applicable), valid for five years.
- AHPRA registration (for nurses, midwives, allied health and other AHPRA-regulated professionals).
- Qualifications: Vocational Education and Training (VET) and higher education qualifications, plus overseas qualifications recognised via VETASSESS.
- First aid and CPR certification with expiry tracking.
- Work history with verified employer feedback and references.
- Two-way reputation: workers see provider ratings and reviews; providers see verified worker references and employer feedback.

## 3. Credential trust tiers (0 to 4)

Every credential on a Career Passport carries its own trust tier. Providers see the tier per credential, not just a blanket "verified / not verified".

- **Tier 0, No passport**: credential has not been added.
- **Tier 1, Pending**: credential has been uploaded but not yet reviewed.
- **Tier 2, Reviewed**: a Koora administrator has visually inspected the document.
- **Tier 3, Verified**: the credential has been verified against its authoritative source (DVS, the AHPRA register, a state Working With Children Check register, the National Worker Screening Database, VETASSESS, and so on).
- **Tier 4, Verified and monitoring**: verified, plus continuous monitoring against the issuing authority and ongoing ban register screening.

Tier is per credential, not per worker, so a single Career Passport may hold a mix of tiers across its credentials at any moment.

## 4. How verification works

### Identity and work rights

Koora's identity check is purpose-built for the care sector. It verifies the worker's identity and their Australian work rights in one step, via the Document Verification Service (DVS) and FrankieOne (workflow `AUS-DVS-Check`).

Because every care role requires proof of Australian work rights, Koora does not accept driver's licences. A driver's licence proves identity but does not prove work entitlement. The accepted documents are:

- **Australian passport**: proves Australian citizenship.
- **Australian birth certificate**: proves Australian citizenship (registration state and date captured).
- **Australian citizenship certificate**: proves citizenship (acquisition date captured).
- **Medicare card (green)**: Australian citizen or permanent resident.
- **Medicare card (blue)**: temporary resident with work rights until card expiry.
- **Foreign passport**: visa holders; work rights resolved via VEVO.

DVS results are one of: `verified`, `blocked`, `duplicate`, `dvs_mismatch`, `risk_review`. Retry limits are enforced.

### Work rights (VEVO)

For foreign passport holders, Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO) is called via FrankieOne. VEVO returns the current visa subclass, work conditions, hour limits, employer sponsorship constraints, regional restrictions, and expiry. Koora surfaces plain-English provider warnings for limited hours, employer-sponsored, regional-restricted, working holiday (six months maximum per employer), no work rights, and other condition categories.

### AHPRA

Koora models 17 AHPRA-regulated professions: nursing, midwifery, paramedicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychology, pharmacy, podiatry, osteopathy, Chinese medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, medical radiation practice, optometry, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health practice, and others regulated by the national scheme. Koora administrators verify registrations against the public AHPRA register and capture the registration number, profession, endorsements, conditions, and expiry.

### NDIS Worker Screening

Workers upload their clearance card or provide their clearance number. Koora administrators review the uploaded evidence for authenticity and accuracy. Portal-direct verification against the National Worker Screening Database is not currently performed. The NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission operates continuous monitoring upstream, and Koora ingests resulting exclusions into its ban register screening. Clearances are valid for five years.

### Working With Children Check

State-specific regimes. Koora administrators verify against each state or territory's public register where portal verification is available, or review uploaded documents where it is not. See section 9 for the full per-state breakdown.

### Police certificate

Koora accepts current National Police Certificates (NPCs) issued by ACIC-accredited agencies. Koora tracks issue and expiry dates, flags certificates older than three years (the aged care currency threshold under the Accountability Principles), and surfaces expired certificates. Koora is not itself an ACIC-accredited police checking agency; it does not conduct, perform, or run police checks.

### Qualifications

VET qualifications (Certificate III in Individual Support, Certificate IV in Ageing Support, Certificate IV in Disability, Diploma of Community Services, Diploma of Nursing, Diploma of Early Childhood Education and Care, Bachelor of Early Childhood Education, and others) and higher education qualifications are uploaded and verified by Koora administrators. Overseas qualifications are accepted with VETASSESS or equivalent skills assessment evidence.

### First aid and CPR

First aid (HLTAID011, HLTAID012) and CPR (HLTAID009) certificates are uploaded with issue and expiry dates. First aid is valid for three years; CPR is valid for twelve months. Koora monitors expiries and reminds workers ahead of time.

## 5. Ban register screening

Koora screens against three live Australian government ban sources:

- **Aged Care Sector Ban Register**, maintained by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC).
- **NDIS Commission Ban Register**, maintained by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, including banning orders.
- **Victorian Disability Worker Commission (VDWC) Register**, Victorian sector-specific disability worker bans.

Matching uses Postgres trigram similarity (`pg_trgm`) with an 80% threshold against the worker's legal name. Matches enter an administrator-adjudicated queue where a Koora administrator reviews each potential match and either confirms or dismisses it. Each register has its own scheduled ingestion job that refreshes ban data from the source, and workers are rescreened against the refreshed lists on an administrator-triggered cadence.

## 6. Continuous compliance monitoring

- Monitoring status per credential is either `active` (currently being monitored) or `lapsed` (monitoring has fallen behind or stopped). Credentials that are not monitored simply have no monitoring status.
- Automated expiry notifications to workers at 90, 60, 30, and 7 days before expiry, and again on the day of expiry. Providers with passport access see the same expiry signals in aggregate.
- A scheduled job acts on expired evidence: it closes expired evidence requests, auto-declines provider applications whose required evidence has expired, and clears `ban_check_status` markers whose supporting evidence is no longer current, so the workforce view never shows a worker as "passing" a ban check on expired evidence.
- Credential state is read live on every provider view, so a provider's workforce dashboard always reflects the worker's current credentials rather than a cached snapshot from the original access grant.

## 7. The compliance engine

Koora's compliance logic is a data-driven rules engine, not a hardcoded set of checks. Every sector is modelled as three pillars:

- **Qualification**: does the worker hold the right qualification for the role?
- **Safety**: does the worker hold the right safety credentials (first aid, CPR, food safety) for the role?
- **Compliance**: does the worker hold the right regulatory credentials (police certificate, Working With Children Check, NDIS Worker Screening, AHPRA) for the sector and role?

Each pillar holds one or more alternative groups of rules. A worker passes a pillar when at least one alternative group is fully satisfied. A worker is eligible for a sector when all three pillars pass. Rules are sector-scoped, pillar-scoped, and optionally role-scoped, so requirements tighten automatically for clinical and educator roles.

The engine knows when an authoritative registration can substitute for a document. For example, an active AHPRA registration in nursing can satisfy the CPR component of the safety pillar for a registered nurse.

- Rules encode `document_type_codes[]`, `rule_type` (`any_of` / `all_of`), `alternative_group` (OR logic across groups), and flags for AHPRA and NDIS Worker Screening substitution.
- Eligibility is computed per worker per sector (and per role) on every relevant event: credential upload, verification, expiry, ban match, role selection.
- When regulations change, rules are updated in the database and the engine re-evaluates without a code deploy.
- Administrator verification decisions on individual documents are audit-logged (document state changes carry reviewer attribution). Pillar evaluations themselves are recomputed from authoritative state rather than separately logged.

## 8. Roles Koora tracks compliance for

Role-specific requirements layer over the sector baselines. Every role below is in production today.

### Clinical and care roles (aged care and disability)

- **Registered Nurse**: AHPRA registration in nursing (mandatory, substitutes for the qualification pillar). First aid (HLTAID012, or HLTAID011 plus HLTAID009), with AHPRA satisfying the CPR component.
- **Enrolled Nurse**: AHPRA registration in nursing (mandatory). First aid as per Registered Nurse.
- **Allied Health Professional**: AHPRA registration in one of physiotherapy, occupational therapy, psychology, pharmacy, podiatry, paramedicine, osteopathy, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health practice. First aid as per Registered Nurse.
- **Direct Care / Personal Care / Disability Support Worker**: Certificate III in Individual Support, Certificate IV in Ageing Support, Certificate IV in Disability, Diploma of Community Services, or AHPRA registration. First aid (HLTAID012, or HLTAID011 plus HLTAID009).
- **Behaviour Support Practitioner**: qualifications and compliance per sector; no mandatory first aid at the engine level.
- **Support Coordinator**: qualifications and compliance per sector; no mandatory first aid.
- **Plan Manager**: qualifications and compliance per sector; no mandatory first aid.
- **Lifestyle / Recreation Worker**: qualifications and compliance per sector. First aid (HLTAID012, or HLTAID011 plus HLTAID009).

### Education and care roles (childcare, ECEC)

- **Early Childhood Teacher**: Bachelor of Early Childhood Education or ACECQA-approved equivalent. Childcare-specific first aid: HLTAID012 (childcare variant), or HLTAID011 plus anaphylaxis plus asthma management (all three).
- **Diploma Educator**: Diploma of Early Childhood Education and Care or ACECQA-approved equivalent. Childcare first aid as above.
- **Certificate III Educator**: Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care or ACECQA-approved equivalent. Childcare first aid as above.
- **Trainee Educator**: evidence of enrolment in an ACECQA-approved qualification. Childcare first aid as above.
- **Home-based (Family Day Care) Educator**: qualification and compliance tracking per NQF and state regulations.

### Cross-sector non-care roles

- **Cook / Chef**: Food Safety Supervisor certification.
- **Food Handler**: Food Handler Certificate.
- **Facilities / Maintenance / Support**: compliance pillar only.
- **Administration**: compliance pillar only.
- **Management / Leadership**: compliance pillar only.
- **Volunteer**: compliance pillar only.
- **Agency / Relief**: compliance pillar only.

For every role, Koora computes a live "qualified for this role" signal based on the worker's verified credentials plus the role-specific rules. Providers see this on the workforce view; workers see it in their Career Passport.

## 9. State-based and federal compliance

### Federal

- **Aged Care Act 2024** and **Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards** (aged care, commenced 1 November 2025).
- **NDIS Act** and **NDIS Practice Standards** (disability).
- **National Quality Framework** and **National Law** (childcare), administered by ACECQA.
- **Privacy Act 1988** and the Australian Privacy Principles.
- **National Police Certificates** via ACIC-accredited agencies (three-year currency for aged care workers under the Accountability Principles).
- **AHPRA registration**: national scheme covering all states and territories.

### State and territory, Working With Children Check

Eight distinct regimes. Koora tracks each worker's state of clearance and supports multi-state clearances where applicable.

- **NSW**, Working With Children Check (WWC), Office of the Children's Guardian, 5 years. Portal-verified.
- **VIC**, Working With Children Check (WWCC), Department of Government Services, 5 years. Portal-verified.
- **QLD**, Blue Card, Blue Card Services, 3 years. Portal-verified.
- **SA**, Working With Children Check, DHS Screening Unit, 5 years. Portal-verified.
- **WA**, Working With Children Check, Department of Communities, 3 years. Portal-verified.
- **TAS**, Registration to Work with Vulnerable People (RWVP), Department of Justice, 3 years. Portal-verified.
- **NT**, Ochre Card, SAFE NT, 2 years. Portal-verified.
- **ACT**, Working With Vulnerable People (WWVP), Access Canberra, 5 years. Document upload required.

"Portal-verified" means Koora administrators can look up the card directly against the state register. ACT currently requires document upload.

Koora uses each state's official terminology across the UI and in communications: Blue Card in QLD, RWVP in TAS, Ochre Card in NT, WWVP in ACT.

### State-administered NDIS Worker Screening

Nationally mandated by the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission but administered by each state or territory worker screening unit. Koora records the issuing state, tracks expiry (five years), and ingests ongoing exclusion updates from the NDIS Commission Ban Register.

### Victoria-specific disability

For Victorian workers, Koora additionally screens against the Victorian Disability Worker Commission (VDWC) register.

## 10. Kooka AI

Kooka AI is Koora's embedded compliance and career assistant. It is always called Kooka AI, never "Koora AI".

- **Worker use**: career coaching, credential guidance, job application coaching, plain-English compliance explainers ("what does my WWCC need for this role?", "which first aid certificate counts for aged care?").
- **Provider use**: compliance question answering grounded in the Aged Care Act 2024, Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, NDIS Practice Standards, NDIS Code of Conduct, National Quality Framework, ACECQA requirements, and the state Working With Children Check regimes.
- **Models**: Kooka AI runs on Claude Sonnet 4.6 (`claude-sonnet-4-6`) as default, with a Claude Sonnet 4.5 (`claude-sonnet-4.5`) fallback and escalation to Claude Opus 4.6 (`claude-opus-4-6`) for harder compliance reasoning. All models are served via the Vercel AI Gateway.
- **Retrieval**: Kooka AI is genuinely retrieval-augmented. It uses vector search across Koora's internal compliance knowledge base plus the worker's or provider's own Career Passport data.
- **Free allowance**: free care workers get 25 Kooka AI messages per month. Paid tiers scale accordingly.

## 11. For care workers

- Free forever. No tier, no upsell, no credit card.
- Mobile apps on iOS and Android, plus web.
- Own your Career Passport: upload once, reuse everywhere.
- Grant passport access to a provider: the provider sees your live verified credentials for as long as access is active.
- Two-way reputation: request references, collect employer feedback, see provider ratings before you apply.
- Kooka AI career coaching.

## 12. Passport access

Passport access is the single access model providers use. There is no "Download" concept and no static export. Providers request access; workers approve. Access is live: every view reads current-state credentials, with continuous monitoring in the background.

- First worker is free on every tier (trial mechanism via custom checkout logic, not Stripe coupons).
- Workers can revoke access at any time, with immediate effect: the provider loses visibility the moment revocation is confirmed.
- Access grants, approvals and revocations are captured in the passport access record. Administrator actions that change passport access state are audit-logged.
- Workers can see who has access at any time.

## 13. Aged care

- **Aged Care Act 2024** (commenced 1 November 2025), the most significant aged care legislative overhaul since 1997.
- **Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards**, rights-based and person-centred.
- Police certificate currency requirement: no older than three years for workers in aged care, under the Accountability Principles.
- AHPRA registration currency tracking for nursing and allied health roles.
- Ban screening against the Aged Care Sector Ban Register.
- Role-specific compliance tracking: Registered Nurse, Enrolled Nurse, Allied Health Professional, Direct Care / Personal Care Worker, Lifestyle Worker, and non-care support roles (Cook / Chef, Food Handler, Facilities, Administration, Management, Volunteer, Agency / Relief).

## 14. Disability and NDIS

- **NDIS Practice Standards**: quality and safety requirements for registered NDIS providers.
- **NDIS Code of Conduct**: applies to all NDIS providers and workers, registered and unregistered.
- **NDIS Worker Screening Check**: mandatory for risk-assessed roles with registered providers. Five-year validity. Continuous monitoring is operated upstream by state and territory worker screening units against the National Worker Screening Database (NWSD); Koora ingests resulting exclusions.
- Ban screening against the NDIS Commission Ban Register and, for Victorian workers, the Victorian Disability Worker Commission register.
- Role-specific compliance tracking: Disability Support Worker, Registered Nurse, Enrolled Nurse, Allied Health Professional, Behaviour Support Practitioner, Support Coordinator, Plan Manager, and non-care support roles.

## 15. Childcare

- **National Quality Framework (NQF)**, the regulatory framework for early childhood education and care.
- **ACECQA**, the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority; administers the NQF and approves qualifications.
- **National Law and Regulations**, the legal requirements for education and care services.
- State-specific Working With Children Check compliance across NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, TAS, NT and ACT (see section 9).
- ECEC-relevant qualifications: Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care, Diploma of Early Childhood Education and Care, Bachelor of Early Childhood Education, and ACECQA-approved equivalents.
- Childcare-specific first aid: HLTAID012 (childcare variant), or HLTAID011 plus anaphylaxis plus asthma management.
- State teacher registration for Early Childhood Teachers: VIT (Victoria), NESA (NSW), QCT (Queensland), TRBSA (South Australia), TRBWA (Western Australia). Voluntary or in transition in ACT, TAS, NT.
- Child protection training: federal Geccko Foundations of Child Safety Training for every ECEC worker, plus state-specific overlays (VIC PROTECT for direct-care, ACT Keeping Children and Young People Safe, NSW CHCPRT025/026 for supervisor positions).
- Role-specific compliance tracking: Early Childhood Teacher, Diploma Educator, Certificate III Educator, Trainee Educator, Home-based (Family Day Care) Educator, and non-care support roles.

## 16. For care providers

- Workforce dashboard: every worker, every credential, every expiry, at a glance.
- Real-time compliance status across the whole team, per worker, per role, per sector.
- Automated expiry alerts at 90, 60, 30, and 7 days before expiry and on the day of expiry.
- Ban register monitoring across four government sources with administrator-adjudicated match resolution.
- Role-specific eligibility: see which workers are compliant for which roles, not just a blanket "verified" flag.
- Job posting and applicant management (included in paid tiers).
- HRIS and ATS integrations (see section 18).

## 17. Pricing

Annual billing only. First worker free on every tier.

| Tier | Annual | Workers included | Extra worker per year | Team members | Job posts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flex | Pay-as-you-go | 0 | $42 | 1 | None |
| Starter | $500 | 10 | $50 | 5 | 1 per month |
| Growth | $3,250 | 50 | $65 | 10 | 2 per month |
| Enterprise | Contact us | 200 | Contact us | Unlimited | 5 per month |

- Access model: single "Passport access" (no separate download product).
- All workers get continuous monitoring.
- Per-worker rate increases with tier (paying for platform features, not a volume discount).
- Additional job posts: $50 each. Featured job upgrade: Enterprise only.
- Provider billing via Stripe.

## 18. Integrations

- Koora does not ship direct or native integrations with any HRIS, ATS, or messaging platform. All integrations run through webhooks, Zapier, Make, n8n, or Koora's REST API.
- **Connected in production via webhooks, Zapier, Make, or n8n**: Deputy, Humanforce, Tanda, Employment Hero, FoundU, Lumary, AlayaCare, Skedulo, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Rippling, HiBob, BambooHR, JobAdder, PageUp, Bullhorn, LiveHire, Scout Talent, Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, Slack, Microsoft Teams.
- **REST API and webhooks** for custom integrations beyond the list above.

## 19. Technology partners and stack

- **FrankieOne**: Document Verification Service (DVS) and Visa Entitlement Verification Online (VEVO) provider.
- **ACIC** (Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission): issuing authority for the National Police Certificates that Koora accepts and tracks.
- **AHPRA** (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency): the registration authority Koora verifies health practitioners against.
- **ACQSC** (Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission): source of the Aged Care Sector Ban Register.
- **NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission**: source of the NDIS Commission Ban Register.
- **VDWC** (Victorian Disability Worker Commission): source of the Victorian disability worker ban register.
- **ACECQA** (Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority).
- **Anthropic**: Claude Sonnet 4.6 (default), Claude Sonnet 4.5 (fallback), and Claude Opus 4.6 (escalation) power Kooka AI via the Vercel AI Gateway.
- **Vercel**: web and API hosting.
- **Supabase**: PostgreSQL database and authentication; all data hosted in Australia.
- **Stripe**: provider billing.

## 20. Security and privacy

- **Privacy Act compliant** (Privacy Act 1988, Australian Privacy Principles).
- **256-bit encryption** at rest and in transit.
- **SOC 2 ready**: controls are in place and formal attestation is in progress.
- **Australian data residency**: all Koora data is hosted in Australian data centres.
- **Row-level security (RLS)** on every table that holds user, worker, provider or admin data. Reference and public configuration tables have read-only public policies by design.
- **Audit logs** on verification decisions, credential and passport status changes, administrator actions, and ban-register adjudications. Individual document read events (a provider opening an access-granted passport, for example) are not separately audit-logged.
- Trust centre: https://trust.koora.care

## 21. Company and contact

- **Company**: Koora Care Pty Ltd, Australian company.
- **Website**: https://koora.care
- **Workers**: download the Koora app on iOS or Android (links from https://koora.care/worker)
- **Providers**: https://koora.care/provider
- **Email**: hello@koora.care
- **Phone**: 02 8359 0158
- **LinkedIn**: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kooracare/