How verification works

A credential shows the orange VERIFIED badge only after a human on the EHSMatch operations team checks it against the registry of the board that issued it. We check the Board of Certified Safety Professionals (BCSP), the American Board of Industrial Hygiene (ABIH), and the Institute of Hazardous Materials Management (IHMM).

The badge attaches to one credential, not to a whole profile. A consultant can hold one verified credential next to other claims that remain unverified. Each is labeled separately.

An operator looks the credential up in the issuing board’s registry and captures evidence of what the registry showed. Every status change writes two permanent records at the same moment: a registry-check record (who checked, what the registry returned, the evidence captured) and an audit-log record (the status before, the status after, the actor, the timestamp).

Both records are append-only. They can be added to, never edited and never deleted. The audit trail behind a badge is the same data our own operations tooling runs on — there is no separate public version.

Every credential starts as pending. From pending it can move to verified or failed. A verified credential can later expire, fail a recheck, or be revoked. Failed, expired, and revoked are terminal — a consultant who re-earns a credential submits a fresh record that starts at pending again.

Only two things move a credential between states: an action by the EHSMatch operations team, or a scheduled recheck against the registry. The listed consultant cannot change their own verification status. Neither can we skip states — the system rejects any transition outside the lifecycle above.

Our target: a decision on each submitted credential within 2 business days of it entering the queue. Rechecks run on a schedule tied to each credential type, so a badge reflects the registry as of its most recent check — the check date, not a one-time stamp.

No listing pays for placement. There is no sponsored position, no featured tier, and no pay-for-verification. Verification has one input: what the issuing board’s registry says.

Directory ordering reflects verification state and listing data — never payment. If that ever changes, this page will say so first.

The grey UNVERIFIED chip marks stated evidence: a credential the consultant (or a public source we imported) claims, that we have not yet checked against a registry. Unverified does not mean false — it means unchecked. Where a claim came from a public source, the profile cites that source next to the claim.

Read more about a specific listing’s data on its profile, or see what EHSMatch is. To report an incorrect badge or claim, email records@ehsmatch.com.