NDIS Worker Screening Check
An NDIS Worker Screening Check is a national criminal-history and risk-assessment check required for workers who deliver NDIS supports and services. It's more comprehensive than a standard police check.
NDIS works differently from every other credential here, and it's worth understanding why before reading the rest. The NDIS Commission publishes no register Oho can query per worker. Instead Oho signs in to your organisation's PRODA account, exports your worker list from the Commission's portal, and reconciles it against your records. So a clearance isn't looked up on demand — it arrives on a sync.
Who needs it
Workers in risk-assessed roles delivering NDIS supports or services. The clearance is valid for five years and is recognised across all states and territories as a single national clearance, so a worker doesn't need a separate check per jurisdiction.
What Oho needs
The Worker Screening ID, plus the holder's surname — and the surname has to be right, for reasons below.
12345678 — eight digits.
An application ID from PRODA works too, for a worker who has applied but isn't cleared yet. Oho tells the two apart by shape: eight digits is treated as a clearance card number, anything else as an application ID. Once the application is granted, Oho replaces it with the real card number on its own.
Most credentials here retry with a worker's alternate or preferred name when the first attempt misses. NDIS deliberately doesn't: the surname on the worker's record is typed into PRODA exactly as held, and a mismatch is treated as a signal that your data needs fixing rather than something to work around.
A worker with no surname on record is skipped entirely.
Date of birth is optional but worth adding: it's used as a second cross-check so a substituted Worker Screening ID doesn't quietly match the wrong person.
Before you start
NDIS needs the most set-up of any credential in Oho, and it's arranged with support rather than self-service:
- Your organisation's PRODA account, so Oho can reach the Commission's portal on your behalf.
- Your PRODA organisation name, exactly as PRODA holds it. Oho checks the page it lands on actually belongs to your organisation and refuses to export if it doesn't — a guard against one tenant's data reaching another.
- Sign-in is protected by a one-time code. Oho can collect it automatically from a dedicated mailbox; where it can't, an administrator supplies it once per run.
NDIS Worker Screening is also a plan-gated feature. Contact support if it isn't enabled for your organisation.
A clearance lasts five years, which sounds like something you can set aside and forget. It isn't — a clearance can be suspended or revoked at any point inside that window, and a five-year-old "cleared" record with nothing re-checking it is exactly the exposure this check exists to close.
How Oho verifies it
Two scheduled jobs do the work, and they're set up as a pair:
- The sync signs in to PRODA, exports your organisation's worker list from the Commission's portal, and updates every matching credential in Oho. This runs on the schedule you choose.
- The link attaches workers who aren't yet on your Commission list, so they start appearing in the export. It runs every five minutes and is optional — turn it off and you link workers in the portal yourself.
Because it's an export rather than a lookup, pressing Verify on one worker doesn't fetch a fresh answer. The answer changes on the next sync.
Oho also skips workers already showing a current clearance and concentrates each run on the ones still pending or blocked.
Reading the result
Every check resolves to one of these outcomes:
| Status (as shown in the app) | Colour | What it means | API value |
|---|---|---|---|
| May engage | Green | Valid and current — the person is cleared for the work. | MAY_ENGAGE |
| May not engage | Red | Not valid — expired, suspended, not found, or a match on a ban register. | MAY_NOT_ENGAGE |
| Under review | Yellow | Cleared, but worth a closer look — for example a condition on the clearance, a possible match, or an expiry coming up. | REVIEW_REQUIRED |
| In progress | Grey | Still being checked. | IN_PROGRESS |
| Error | Grey | The source couldn't be reached; Oho will try again. | ERROR |
| What the register holds | What Oho shows | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cleared, within its five years | May engage | Current national clearance |
| Suspended or revoked | May not engage | The clearance no longer stands |
| Excluded | May not engage | The screening unit determined the worker is excluded |
| Expired | May not engage | Past its five-year life |
| Application pending, eligible | May engage | Applied for, and the register says they may work now |
| Application pending, undecided | In progress | Applied for, no eligibility answer yet |
| No matching record | May not engage | Nothing on the register matched this ID |
When it doesn't verify
| What you see | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| May not engage — no matching record | The ID doesn't match a clearance on the register | Check it against the worker's clearance letter. Don't reformat it — enter it as printed |
| In progress that doesn't resolve | The worker holds an application number, not a clearance | Wait for the screening unit's decision. Oho picks it up on a later check |
| Conditions to review on a pending worker | The register says eligible except in QLD, SA and VIC — those states don't allow work on a pending application | Check where the worker is rostered. Outside those three states they may work now |
| In progress across every NDIS worker | The NDIS source isn't configured | Raise it with support — this is a source problem, not a worker one |
| May not engage — suspended | A live suspension inside the five-year window | Act on it. This is the case the ongoing monitoring exists to catch |
| A clearance you know is valid reads red | Often an ID entered from the wrong field of the clearance letter | Compare against the Worker Screening ID specifically, not an application or reference number |
| Error | The Commission's register was unreachable | Nothing. Oho retries on the next run |
Renewals & monitoring
A clearance runs for five years and keeps its ID, so a renewal at the end of that period flows through without re-entering anything.
The monitoring in between is the point. A five-year clearance is the credential most likely to be filed and forgotten, and a suspension or exclusion inside that window is exactly what nobody goes looking for. Each sync re-reads the Commission's list, so a change surfaces on the next run.
Which makes the sync schedule the thing to get right here: unlike the live registers, there's no floor on how often Oho will ask — the cadence you set is the cadence.