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BICA Verification

BICA Verification is the registry-lookup step within the Professional Accountant Variant that confirms a filing accountant's membership in the Bahamas Institute of Chartered Accountants is current and in good standing at the time of attestation.

Why BICA Verification Is Required​

The Professional Accountant Variant carries an enhanced professional duty of care. To ensure that this variant is used only by qualified professionals, CoralLedger Comply verifies membership status in real time. A lapsed, suspended, or unrecognized membership number prevents the professional declaration from being presented.

How Verification Works​

When an accountant selects the Professional Accountant pathway on the Qualifying Screen, they are prompted to enter their BICA membership number before proceeding to the declaration:

  1. Enter your BICA membership number in the field provided
  2. Click Verify
  3. CoralLedger Comply queries the BICA membership registry
  4. The result is displayed within approximately five seconds

Verification Outcomes​

CoralLedger Comply consumes the official BICA Listing of Licensees PDF and the Find-a-Member web surface, then writes the outcome to the Attestation Audit Trail as a BICA_VERIFICATION_ATTEMPTED event. If the registry sources cannot be reached or reconciled, the attempt resolves to Unreachable. The outcome resolves to one of four canonical states:

StateDescription (regulator-visible)Next Step
VerifiedBICA licence verified — licence current; expiry date carried from the listing.Proceed to the Professional Accountant declaration.
NotFoundBICA licence checked — no record on the BICA register.Check for typos; contact BICA if the issue persists.
ExpiredBICA licence checked — record found, licence expired (date carried from the listing).Contact BICA to renew before filing.
UnreachableBICA licence check could not be completed — BICA register did not respond.Stop filing and retry once the BICA register is reachable.

The four-word state token (Verified / NotFound / Expired / Unreachable) is the machine-stable identifier used by audit consumers and regulator inspectors. The prose around each line is editorial and may evolve; the state token is the contract.

There is no skip or manual-upload override on this step. Only Verified allows the Professional Accountant Variant to continue.

Verb Choice (Honest Language)​

The Description verb in the audit row reflects what actually happened:

  • verified — used only when verification succeeded (Verified state).
  • checked — used when the BICA register answered with a definitive negative (NotFound, Expired).
  • check could not be completed — used when no check happened (Unreachable — the register did not respond).

This honesty discipline is per the regulatory product owner's sign-off (CLR-2026-04-COMPLY-01).

Verification Record​

Every verification attempt — whether successful or not — is recorded in the Attestation Audit Trail as a BICA_VERIFICATION_ATTEMPTED event. The event carries both a regulator-visible Description line and a structured metadata payload:

Description (regulator-visible)​

The Description line names the business being attested for (not the practitioner) and embeds the four-word state token. Example for the Unreachable state:

BICA licence check could not be completed for Atlantis Hotel Group — Unreachable; BICA register did not respond

Metadata payload (machine-readable)​

FieldContents
LicenceNumberNormalised BICA identifier as supplied by the practitioner
stateOne of Verified / NotFound / Expired / Unreachable
PractitionerNameName surfaced from the BICA listing (when present)
ListingDateLicence expiry / activity date from the listing (when present)
ListingPublishedAtUTC timestamp the listing PDF was published
FromCachetrue when the result was served from the 24-hour distributed cache

The state= syntax appears only in the structured metadata, never in the regulator-visible Description.

Next Steps​