If your accredited person loses accreditation, the offence is yours

Why installers rarely hear about this

Most of what's written about VEU compliance is written for APs. If you install under someone else's accreditation, the risk that sits on you is different, and we've found very little written about it.

Here it is. Your legal position depends on someone else's accreditation staying valid, and you've got no say in whether it does.

Under section 14AB the Essential Services Commission (ESC) can suspend an AP on the spot, before it gets a chance to argue its case. Section 14 also lets the ESC suspend or cancel an accreditation and ban the AP from applying again. The March 2026 cases show how fast it can move once it does.

And the certificates can go too

The second risk is about money, not the law. If an AP's accreditation collapses, certificates already created for finished jobs can be refused registration. In the two March 2026 cases that was 2,586 certificates in one and 48,550 in the other.

Certificates refused that way can sit behind real installs, done properly by installers who'd finished the work. A sound install doesn't rescue a certificate when the accreditation behind it fails.

So if your AP goes down, you can be hit with the offence, lose the certificate value on jobs you've finished, and lose your future work, all at once.

What can you actually do about it?

To be straight with you, we couldn't find any register of suspended APs, or any published procedure for checking one out. So I'm not going to hand you a checklist that pretends to more certainty than there is.

What you can check is the register of VEECs (Victorian energy efficiency certificates) and the product register, both at veu.esc.vic.gov.au. Beyond that, your best protection is what you put in your agreement with the AP, not anything the regulator does.

1. Ask what happens to your payment if a claim is refused laterThat comes down to your agreement, not the law. If the answer's a shrug, that's your answer.
2. Ask how long they've held accreditation, and for which activitiesAccreditation goes activity by activity. An AP accredited for water heating can't carry your space heating job.
3. Notice how they get their leads, because it's your exposure tooBoth March 2026 cases involved doorknocking and telemarketing. If the AP above you is getting leads that way, the conduct rules are being broken on jobs you're installing.
4. Keep your own copies of everythingIf the AP goes down, their records can go with them. Yours are what you'd have to rely on.