An OpenAssurance profile — organisations
Assess once. Share anywhere.
Prequalification assessments, insurance, health and safety systems, risk management, declarations and supporting evidence — presented to any buyer that wants them, without re-entering the same information in another portal.
Do not recreate information unnecessarily.
Every buyer still decides what it accepts.
The same answers, in a different questionnaire
Contractors and suppliers provide substantially the same organisational information through prequalification schemes, contractor-management platforms, procurement systems, customer portals, tender questionnaires and direct assessments.
A common questionnaire helps organisations ask more consistent questions, which is a real improvement. The next question is whether valid, current, independently verifiable information should have to be supplied again at all.
Can a supplier present valid prequalification information to a buyer without both parties being customers of the same prequalification platform?
The OpenPrequal test
Evidence and assessment are different things
A supplier holds underlying evidence: policies, procedures, insurance, risk-management information, competency systems, incident information. An assessment provider examines that evidence and issues a conclusion.
Keeping the two separate is what makes portability possible without forcing anyone to treat different schemes as equivalent.
Portable does not mean automatically accepted
The obvious objection to portability is that it forces buyers to accept assurance they consider inadequate. That is not the proposal.
A buyer continues to decide which prequalification schemes it accepts, the insurance limits it requires, what evidence must be current, what additional information high-risk work demands, and whether direct assessment is necessary. WorkSafe guidance already states that the level of detail required should be appropriate to the type of project, taking its size and complexity into account.
Do not recreate information unnecessarily. That is not the same as requiring every organisation to accept the same result.
What “assess once, share anywhere” means
OpenPrequal provides the exchange mechanism. The buyer retains the acceptance decision.
Organisation information is not personal information
OpenPrequal is mostly about organisations, but prequalification evidence can still contain information about people — named contacts, directors and officers, identifiable employees, CVs, assessor details, identifiable incident information.
The profile prefers organisation-level evidence wherever it is sufficient, and personal information should not be collected merely because a system is capable of collecting it. Where personal information genuinely is required, the general OpenAssurance privacy principles apply: purpose limitation, minimum disclosure, proportionate retention, and controlled onward sharing.
What OpenPrequal is not
Existing prequalification schemes, assessors and contractor-management products should be able to support OpenPrequal without abandoning their commercial models. They continue to compete on assessment, workflow, reporting and service. What changes is that the underlying record can move.
- Not a prequalification provider
- Not an assessment company
- Not a national contractor database
- Not a central list of approved companies
- Not a scheme equivalence authority
- Not a replacement for existing assessment schemes
- Not a replacement for contractor-management systems
Where this is up to
OpenPrequal is an early-stage proposal, not a completed standard. No exchange protocol, schema, or conformance suite exists yet.
The current stage is testing the problem and assumptions with suppliers, buyers, asset owners, regulators, industry organisations and assessment providers. Disagreement is useful — including reasons the approach will not work.