Professional certificate holder in EE
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
Estonia has every component of grade A and still does not reach it, and the reason is exactly the distinction this lab keeps making. There is a register of professional certificates, over a hundred thousand of them, refreshed nightly, with holders’ names and identity codes validated against the population register, feeding the state portal where a citizen sees all their own certificates including expired ones, and connected to the economic activities register and the punishment register. Every message between those systems travels over the national data exchange layer, and every one of those messages is digitally signed and timestamped, with the logs admissible as court evidence. A citizen can be handed a signed .asice file by a public body and verify it on a laptop without a card reader. So the state signs the pipe between institutions and signs documents it issues to individuals, and still publishes no signed file of who holds what. Sign the artefact, not the channel: that sentence is the whole of RVW-5 and Estonia is the proof that the two are not the same thing.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Yes | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | Yes | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Sign the file
The export exists and is machine readable, which is the expensive part. What remains is a key and one DNS record on a domain the authority already controls, which makes the file impossible to forge and takes this row to grade A.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.