The VOG in your Yivi wallet: prove that the certificate of conduct is really yours
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The VOG in your Yivi wallet: prove that the certificate of conduct is really yours

• Yivi Team 7 min read
VOG certificate of conduct Justis validatie.nl identity wallet verifiable credentials screening profile identification

A document that keeps having to travel

Every year Justis, the screening authority of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, issues around 1.8 million certificates of conduct, known in the Netherlands as the VOG (Verklaring Omtrent het Gedrag). A VOG shows that your past conduct is no obstacle to a specific role or task: working in childcare, in healthcare, as a taxi driver, in a port area, or as a volunteer at one of the more than 26,000 sports clubs that rely on it.

The application itself is now largely digital. The employer prepares the request, the applicant logs in with DigiD, pays 33.85 euros and receives the VOG after one to four weeks, either on paper or as a digitally sealed PDF in the government message box on MijnOverheid. That is where the real problem starts. The applicant forwards the PDF or brings the paper along. The employer then has to check whether the document is genuine: on paper by looking at the watermark, hologram and UV features, for a PDF via the validation service at validatie.nl. A screenshot or photo cannot be verified at all, and fraudsters know that.

That fraud is not a theoretical risk. In 2023 the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate received 198 reports of care workers operating with forged diplomas, certificates or VOGs, up from 106 in 2022. In 2025 a convicted financial controller turned out to have worked at several large organisations on a forged VOG.

And even a genuine VOG has a weak spot: the document says nothing about the person handing it over or emailing it. A PDF can be forwarded endlessly. Whoever receives it still has to ask for an identity document and compare the name and date of birth by hand.

Machiel Tesser recently put it well in his article De VOG is geen documentprobleem. Het is een tussenruimteprobleem (in Dutch: “The VOG is not a document problem. It is a problem of the space in between”). The document itself is fine. The problem arises in the space between organisations: Justis has already done the assessment, but every employer or club has to rebuild that certainty from scratch. The result is copies, emails, local registrations and ever more checks.

The VOG as a card in your Yivi wallet

With vog.yivi.app you put your VOG in your Yivi wallet as a card. All you need is the digital VOG you received from Justis as a PDF. This is how it works:

  1. Upload your VOG. You select the original, digitally sealed PDF you received from Justis. The file is kept only for the duration of the session, at most one hour, and is not stored.
  2. The VOG is checked with validatie.nl. The service sends the PDF to validatie.nl, the validation service of the Ministry of Justice and Security, which establishes that the document is authentic and has not been altered since it was issued. A PDF that is unknown there, or that has been modified, goes no further. Only after a positive result is the data read from the VOG: reference number, date, name, date of birth, purpose and screening profile.
  3. Prove that it is you. You prove your identity in the Yivi app with your BRP personal data, passport, ID card or driving licence. The service compares given names, surname and date of birth with what is stated on the VOG.
  4. The card is issued. If the data matches, the VOG is offered to your Yivi app as a card. If it does not match, no card is issued: only the person the VOG was issued to can add it. Afterwards the card lives only on your phone and the PDF has been removed from the service.
The VOG as a card in the Yivi app, showing Yes or No per screening profile aspect and a validity date

The card contains what an organisation wants to know. Alongside the reference number, date, name and date of birth, it states for each aspect of the general screening profile whether it was assessed: for example 84 care for minors, 85 care for vulnerable persons, 63 transport of persons or 91 port area.

Identification and VOG in one go

The real difference is on the receiving side. The card in Yivi is not just a digital copy of the PDF. It was issued after two things were established: the VOG is genuine according to validatie.nl, and the person who added it proved in Yivi to be the same person named on the VOG. Whoever presents the card is, by definition, the holder of that VOG.

A sports club, childcare provider or HR department shows a QR code and requests the VOG in a single session, optionally together with other data from the wallet, such as an email address or phone number to link the person to its own records. The holder sees exactly what is being requested in the app, approves, and the recipient has a cryptographically verified answer within seconds. No PDF to validate, no copy of an identity document to store, and no manual comparison of names and dates of birth. Tesser sums up the gain in one sentence: verification moves from weeks to seconds.

For the holder the change is just as big. Someone volunteering at two clubs, or a freelancer working for several clients, presents the same card each time instead of digging up and forwarding the PDF again and again. And every time you share the card, you decide which data the organisation gets to see.

What organisations can do with it

  • Sports clubs and volunteer organisations check the VOG of new coaches and supervisors in one go at the start of the season, certain that the VOG belongs to that person, without having to keep copies of identity documents.
  • Healthcare and childcare tie the VOG check into onboarding, with exactly the screening aspects that apply to the role, and repeat it easily on a change of role or at periodic re-screening.
  • Staffing and secondment agencies verify the same card again at every placement, instead of trusting a PDF in the file.
  • Employers in transport, logistics and port areas build the check into existing access and registration processes, using the same Yivi integration they use for login or identification.

Privacy stays front and centre

A VOG contains sensitive information, which is exactly why it fits the way Yivi handles data. The uploaded PDF is not stored and is removed once the card has been issued. The card lives only on the holder’s device, not in a central database. The holder decides per session what to share: a sports club that only needs to know whether aspect 84 was assessed does not have to see which other aspects are on the VOG. The recipient must be registered as a verifier in advance and can only request the data it has been approved for, in line with the data minimisation that eIDAS 2.0 requires.

Try it yourself

Do you have a digital VOG from Justis? Go to vog.yivi.app, upload the PDF and prove your identity with the Yivi app. No identity data in Yivi yet? First load your passport, ID card or driving licence, or retrieve your BRP personal data.

Are you an organisation that handles many VOGs and wants to build the VOG check into its own process? Get in touch with our team at support@yivi.app.

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