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How seafarer certificate verification actually works

By the Docka team · Reviewed 7 September 2026

Last updated: 7 September 2026

Verification means asking the authority that issued a certificate whether it is on its records. Nothing else counts. A scanned Certificate of Competency looks reassuringly official: stamp, signature, a QR code in the corner. None of that proves anything. A stamp can be copied. A PDF can be edited. An expiry date can be typed to say whatever someone wants it to say.

Real verification does not read the document. It goes back to the authority that issued it and asks.

Primary-source verification, in plain words

The term for this is primary-source verification. The "primary source" is the maritime authority that issued the certificate: Transpordiamet in Estonia, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in the United Kingdom, and so on. The certificate is a copy; the authority's register is the original. Verification means checking the copy against the original. There is a longer definition of primary source verification on its own page.

That is a different thing from what a lot of "verification" is in practice, which is: someone looks at the PDF, decides it looks fine, and files it. That is not verification. It is a second opinion on a photo.

The honest version has a hard rule behind it: never re-type what a document says and call the result verified. If the check did not reach the issuing authority's own records, it did not verify anything.

Why some registers can be checked automatically and others can't

Here is the part nobody enjoys explaining: maritime authorities are not consistent. Every flag state runs its own register, on its own system, with its own rules about who is allowed to look. That is the reality any verification tool has to work with, and pretending otherwise is where overselling starts.

In practice, countries fall into a few honest tiers.

Live automatic checks. Some authorities publish a verification service that answers a query straight away. You give it a certificate number (and often a date of birth or holder name), and it tells you whether that certificate is on its records. These are the ones you can check in seconds. Docka runs live automatic checks against eight flag-state registers: Estonia, Denmark, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, Norway, France, Ukraine's state register and Azerbaijan.

Existence checks, not validity checks. This distinction matters more than it sounds. Some registers confirm that a document exists on file without telling you it is currently valid. Bulgaria is the clear example: Docka can confirm automatically that a Bulgarian document exists in the official register (for certificates issued 2017 and later), but that is a presence check, not a validity verdict. "It's on file" and "it's valid right now" are not the same sentence, and an honest tool never lets one masquerade as the other.

Assisted checks. Many official portals sit behind a step a machine is not allowed to pass: a CAPTCHA, or a declaration that the requester has a legal reason to look. You cannot automate those without either breaking the authority's rules or attesting to a legal declaration on someone else's behalf, and a responsible tool does neither. The honest thing is to take the user straight to the correct official form, pre-fill what it can, and let a person finish the check. That is help, not a verdict, and it should be labelled as help.

Manual and vetted access. A few authorities have no public lookup at all. Access is granted only to registered, vetted accounts, or confirmation happens by email. Here "verification" is a request with a turnaround time, not an instant answer.

The temptation is to flatten all of this into one big number ("we verify 26 registries!") and hope nobody reads the footnote. But a number that lumps a live government check together with an email you have to send yourself is not describing a capability. It is describing a wish. The count that matters is the one you can stand behind. The full list by tier, with the authority behind each one, is on the registry coverage page.

What each live register asks for

A register can only answer the question it was built to answer, and each one keys the lookup on different fields printed on the certificate. The table lists the registers Docka queries automatically, the fields each one takes, and the authority's own portal, so you can run the same check by hand. The labels are Docka's; the fields are the portal's.

A worked example: one Danish certificate, start to finish

A crewing desk receives a scanned Danish Certificate of Competency for a second engineer joining next month. The person at the desk reads the certificate number from the document, selects Denmark, and pastes the number. Docka sends that number to the Danish Maritime Authority's verification service, the same service a person reaches at verify.dma.dk. Nothing from the PDF is trusted at this point; the PDF only supplied the number to look up.

The register answers. Whatever it says is recorded as the result, with the time of the query, and the document is labelled at the level the check reached: a flag-state confirmation is L3, a register that only confirmed existence would be L2, and a number the register does not recognise earns no level at all. The desk sees the register's answer, the timestamp and the level. It never sees a Docka opinion about whether the scan looked genuine, because Docka does not form one. If the register cannot be reached, the result is marked inconclusive; an outage is not a fail.

A note on the "PSV" abbreviation

If you research this topic you will run into the initials PSV. In credentialing they stand for primary source verification, the checking method described above. In shipping the same three letters mean platform supply vessel, a type of ship. Same letters, unrelated meanings. This article means the checking method, and spelling it out avoids the collision.

The trust levels: saying exactly how much you confirmed

Because the checks differ in strength, the results have to differ in strength too. A tool that stamps everything "verified" is lying by rounding up. Docka labels every document with one of four levels, so a compliance officer sees a green tick and what kind of green tick it is. This table is the definition the whole product uses; the other pages on this site link here instead of copying it.

The ladder is not decoration. L1 means a human reviewer opened the actual document and confirmed it, which is worth recording and is still not a registry check. The gap between L2 and L3 is the gap between "this document exists somewhere" and "this authority confirms this document", and that gap is exactly where forged and recycled certificates get caught.

What the Convention says about fraud

The problem is old enough to be written into the treaty. The IMO's page on the STCW Convention records that the 2010 Manila amendments introduced "improved measures to prevent fraudulent practices associated with certificates of competency", alongside the five-yearly refresher training for basic safety, advanced fire fighting and survival craft proficiencies. The same page lists the Convention's chapters, from chapter I (general provisions, which carries the certification and revalidation rules) to chapter VIII (watchkeeping).

Docka does not restate the regulation text, and it does not decide whether a seafarer meets a manning requirement. What it does is the part the treaty assumes someone will do: ask the issuing administration whether the certificate is real and current. The register lookups described on this page are how an agency acts on the fraud measures in practice.

Why an agency should care

For a crewing agency, the payoff is not abstract.

Forged and duplicated certificates. A convincing fake passes a human eye. It does not pass the issuing register, because it was never in it. A primary-source check is the point where a forgery stops being your problem before a seafarer boards.

Lapsed STCW documents. An expiry date printed on a PDF is a claim, not a fact. Checking the live record, and hard-blocking a seafarer the moment a required certificate lapses, is how you avoid discovering the lapse during a port state inspection instead of before it.

Defensible records. When every document carries an honest level, an audit is a matter of showing your work. "L3, confirmed against the issuing register" is a sentence you can stand behind. "It looked fine" is not.

The short version

Verification worth the name checks a certificate against the authority that issued it, not against a nicer copy of the certificate. Where a register answers automatically, you get a live check in seconds. Where it only confirms existence, you should be told exactly that. Where it cannot be automated at all, the honest move is to say so and point you at the official source. And every result should carry a label that admits how far the check got, because a compliance record you can defend is built from what you confirmed, not from what the PDF claimed.

Docka is built by Docka Development OÜ (Tallinn, Estonia). The about page has the company details; the registry coverage page has the current list of registers by tier.

Frequently asked questions

What does primary source verification of a seafarer certificate mean?

It means the certificate is checked against the record held by the authority that issued it, not against the document in your hand. For an Estonian certificate that record is Transpordiamet's Seafarers Information System; for a British one it is the Maritime and Coastguard Agency's register. A copy of the certificate, however good, is never the primary source.

What is the difference between registry-confirmed and government-verified?

Registry-confirmed (L2) means a register says the document exists; the holder has not been tied to it. Government-verified (L3) means the issuing flag state's own register confirmed the certificate. In Docka the Bulgarian existence check and the Ukrainian training-centre validator stop at L2; only a flag-state register can produce L3.

Why can't every flag state register be checked automatically?

Because the authorities differ. Some publish a form that answers a query straight away. Others put a CAPTCHA or a legal-requester declaration in front of the form, which a machine must not pass on someone else's behalf. A few have no public lookup at all and confirm by email or to vetted accounts. Docka automates the first group, opens and pre-fills the form for the second, and treats the third as a request.

What does a not-found result mean?

Exactly what the register said, and no more. A forged certificate comes back not found because it was never recorded. A genuine certificate can also come back not found when the register's searchable coverage starts after the issue date, as with the Ukrainian state register, whose quick search reliably covers documents issued 2023 and later. Docka reports the register's answer and the coverage limit together; it does not turn a not-found into a verdict.

Does Docka keep the details it sends to a register?

Docka stores the certificate number and the result with a timestamp. A sensitive lookup input, such as the Bulgarian personal number (EGN), is sent to the authority for that single lookup and is not stored.

Related guides

• Spot a forged or recycled seafarer certificate
• How to check if an STCW certificate is still valid
• CoC, CoP, endorsement, GMDSS and medical: what each STCW document proves
• Port State Control and crew certificates: what inspectors check
• How Docka works for crewing agencies
• Agency pricing