New in the chair: the workforce compliance questions to ask in week one
Six aged care CEO and chair changes were announced in a single August fortnight. Five questions a new executive should ask about the workforce record, and what a slow answer tells you.
In a single fortnight in August 2026, Australian aged care announced a new chief executive at Alinea, a retiring chief executive at ANHF after 21 years, an exiting chief executive at St Andrew's, a new chair at Uniting AgeWell, a new chair at Curtin Heritage Living, and a new chair and deputy chair at Catholic Health Australia. Regis Aged Care changed both its managing director and its chief financial officer inside six weeks.
Whoever walks in inherits the workforce record as it stands, and inherits accountability for it immediately. These are the questions worth asking before the first board paper, and the value is as much in how long the answers take as in what they say.
Start with the number, because the number is usually wrong
How many people are we responsible for screening?
The headcount from payroll is the wrong answer. The obligation reaches subcontractors, agency staff, and anyone entering a client's home in a role connected to the delivery of funded care, none of whom appear on a payroll report. In home care in particular, the gap between the payroll figure and the real figure can be substantial.
If the organisation cannot state one number with confidence, everything downstream of it is an estimate.
Ask what could be produced today, without anyone chasing it
For how many of those people could we show a current screening outcome right now, from a system, without emailing a service manager?
This separates the organisations that hold a live record from the ones that run a collection exercise whenever somebody asks. Both can produce a report eventually. Only one of them knows the answer between reports, which is the state the organisation is in for most of the year.
The follow-up is the useful one: if the Commission asked this afternoon, how long until we had it?
Ask for the expiry curve over the next 90 days
How many credentials expire in the next 30, 60 and 90 days, and who is accountable for each? A single compliance percentage is a photograph of today and says nothing about the next quarter.
This matters more in aged care than the headline number suggests, because a National Police Certificate has a hard 3 year ceiling. A workforce with a lot of certificates issued in the same recruitment push will age out in the same month, and a compliance rate of 98 per cent today can be considerably worse in eight weeks with nothing having gone wrong.
Ask who checked each record, and whether it was reviewed or verified against the register
These are two different acts and the distinction is the whole quality of your evidence.
Verified against the register means the credential was checked against an authoritative register, such as AHPRA. Reviewed means a person looked at a document and formed a judgement. Aged care screening sits mostly in the second category, because neither a police certificate nor an NDIS Worker Screening Clearance has a register the provider can query.
A dashboard that reports both as a green tick has flattened the difference. Ask which of your green ticks came from a register and which came from someone's reading of a PDF, and whether that someone was inside your organisation or a supplier telling you their staff are fine.
Ask what happens when a clearance is revoked mid-employment
Screening at onboarding is a snapshot. The question is what mechanism exists for the two years after it.
There are three real answers: the public ban registers, which are screened on an ongoing basis; a scheme notifying you as the linked employer when a clearance changes, which only works if you are actually recorded as the employer; and your own re-check on a schedule. If the answer is that a manager would probably hear about it, that is not a control.
A report that needs two weeks' notice is not a control
A compliance system is tested by whether the organisation knows its position on a Tuesday with nobody preparing anything. Producing a clean report eventually is a lower bar, and most organisations clear it. If a current-state answer requires a project, then between projects the organisation is operating on a belief rather than a fact, and that belief is what the new executive has just signed up to.
Authoritative sources
- Aged care worker screening requirements (Department of Health, Disability and Ageing)
- Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission: provider obligations
- Aged Care Act 2024
Where a workforce bureau fits
Most of the slow answers above have the same cause. Each provider keeps its own private copy of the same facts about the same people, rebuilt from scratch each time someone changes jobs, and nobody owns keeping it current between requests.
A bureau is the other arrangement: one maintained record of a worker's checks that many organisations can rely on. The worker holds the Career Passport and decides who sees it, and the bureau holds the verification history. We define what we do and do not mean by the word in why we removed the worker marketplace.
Against the five questions: the record covers contractors and agency workers who hold a passport, not only employees; the compliance engine tests every worker's records against what their role requires and reports current state rather than a collated one; expiry is tracked per credential so the 90 day curve is visible; every credential carries the level it has actually reached, so reviewed and verified by Koora stay labelled separately; and the public ban registers are screened continuously, with the caveat that a police certificate never updates and no platform can make it.
Koora pre-clears. The legal responsibility for who you engage stays with the organisation, which in week one is the person asking these questions. For what it takes to move off the spreadsheet, see tracking worker compliance: spreadsheet vs software.
This is general information, not compliance advice. Always confirm requirements with the relevant regulator, and remember that providers keep the legal responsibility to sight credentials and decide who can work.
We work hard to keep everything accurate, and our compliance engine keeps up with the rules as they change. Even so, we might get a detail slightly wrong or miss something. No one's perfect. If you think something here needs updating, email us at resources@koora.care. We would genuinely rather know, because we all do better when we help each other get it right.
Bring your compliance into one place
See how Koora keeps your workforce credentials checked, current and audit-ready. Your first five workers are free.