For decades, an Indian engineer heading to a job in Riyadh carried a thick envelope of stamped paper.
The university stamp. The state education department’s stamp. The Ministry of External Affairs stamp. Then the Saudi mission’s stamp on top. By the time the degree reached an employer, it had collected four or five official seals.
Every one of those seals confirmed that the seal before it was genuine. Not one of them confirmed that the candidate had actually earned the degree.
Attestation, in other words, was never verification. Saudi Arabia has now decided to do the verification itself.
For the largest labour corridor into the Kingdom, the one running from India, that changes hiring from end to end. It also creates a new and very tempting assumption, one worth examining carefully.
Why the Kingdom Stopped Trusting Stamps
Saudi Arabia’s problem with forged qualifications has been public for more than a decade.
In 2020, the Saudi Council of Engineers said 2,799 expatriate engineers faced prosecution after their engineering and technical certificates were found to be forged. A year earlier, officials had seized around 3,000 bogus engineering degrees in a campaign run with public security and the passport police.
The problem reached beyond engineering. In 2023, the accountancy regulator SOCPA detected 171 forged professional certificates, and prosecutors warned that electronic forgery could mean up to five years in prison and fines of up to SR5 million.
Indian professionals have featured in these cases too. In 2023, an engineer from Telangana was jailed for a year, fined and ordered deported after submitting an Osmania University engineering degree that turned out to be forged.
The pattern was clear. Document chains could be gamed, and the harm surfaced on construction sites and in hospitals, long after the paperwork had been stamped.
What the Kingdom Now Checks
The response sits under the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development’s Professional Accreditation framework, which has two main arms.
The Qualification Verification Program checks certificates directly with the body that issued them, and for most degrees it has replaced the old cultural-mission attestation. Its official remit is broader than the degree alone: it verifies the validity and alignment of an expatriate’s qualifications and experience against the requirements of the Saudi labour market.
The scale is national. In January 2025, the ministry completed the final phase of its Professional Verification service, covering 1,007 professions across 160 labour-exporting countries, focused on higher-skill groups including engineering and health.
Practitioners have watched it widen further. Fragomen reports QVP now applies across all industry sectors and a broader range of countries. For Indian applicants, pre-verification has been enforced for work visa stamping since mid-January 2025, according to visa facilitators.
For trades, the second arm applies. The Skill Verification Program, launched in 2021, began its first phase in India in December 2022 in New Delhi and Mumbai, requiring written and practical exams for 19 professions including building electricians, plumbers and welders. Its service fee moves to 85 US dollars from 9 September 2026.
This is, in effect, primary source verification at national scale, run by the state, before a visa is ever issued.
The Corridor That Matters Most
For India, this is not a niche regulatory story.
Saudi Arabia has about 2.46 million overseas Indians, almost all of them NRIs. Indians remain the Kingdom’s largest foreign community. Every new verification requirement lands first and hardest on Indian candidates, Indian recruiters and the Gulf employers who hire through them.
The Indian side of the corridor has its own gatekeeping. The Emigration Act 1983 governs Indian citizens holding Emigration Check Required passports who migrate to 18 designated countries, including the Gulf states, and recruiting agents must hold a registration certificate from the Protector General of Emigrants.
That system is under strain. MEA told Parliament it had identified 3,505 unauthorised immigration agents, and Delhi recorded 153 complaints against illegal recruitment agents in 2025, up from 92 in 2024.
So a Gulf hire from India now passes two layers of state control: India’s emigration system on the way out, and Saudi Arabia’s professional accreditation on the way in. It is tempting to conclude that, between them, the candidate has been thoroughly checked.
What the State Check Answers, and Answers Well
It is worth being precise about the value here, because it is real.
QVP and SVP answer a focused question with genuine rigour. Is this qualification genuine and recognised, and does it fit the occupation on the visa? For trades, can this person actually do the work?
That shuts down the cheapest and most common fraud in the corridor: the purchased degree, the diploma from an unrecognised institution, the trade certificate for a skill the worker doesn’t have.
It also attacks a long-standing pattern. Many Indians, including engineers and IT professionals, legally entered Saudi Arabia under one visa category and later changed their job titles. By tying verification to the occupation on the visa, the programme makes the job title mean something.
For employers, that is a genuine gift. Work that once depended on an employer’s own diligence, or on faith in a stack of stamps, is now done by the state at source.
What It Was Never Designed to Answer
The trouble starts when “the visa cleared” is heard as “the candidate is verified”. The state check is built around the Saudi labour market’s needs. An employer’s risk is wider.
Criminal and civil history is the most obvious gap. QVP does not search the district courts of a candidate’s home state. In India, as we have explored before on this blog, there is no single national criminal database employers can query. A criminal check is a search engineered across the right courts and jurisdictions, not a lookup. A cleared QVP report says nothing about a pending case.
Identity continuity is the second gap. Verification confirms a document is genuine. It does not, on its own, guarantee that the person who interviewed, the person who sat the trade test and the person who arrives in Dammam are the same individual.
Employment history is the third. The state assesses experience as it bears on the occupation. It isn’t reconciling a full work history against provident fund records, checking for undisclosed dual employment or confirming how each job ended.
Then there is everything a standard background check covers that a qualification check was never meant to: address, conduct, adverse media, sanctions exposure.
And there is time. QVP happens before the visa. After arrival, job titles change, people move into safety-critical roles and certificates expire. SVP certificates, for instance, are valid for five years.
None of this is a criticism of the programme. It is simply a description of its edges.
Every Gate Grows a Trade
One more dynamic deserves attention, because it follows every new verification requirement anywhere in the world.
When a gate appears, a trade in getting through it grows around it. Facilitators already market QVP support, and some claim universities won’t reply unless requests are routed through a recognised facilitator. Most of this is legitimate help with a slow process.
But the same ecosystem that smooths genuine applications is where document tampering, identity mismatches and substitution schemes will be attempted. India’s experience-certificate rackets, covered previously on this blog, are the precedent. When verification tightens on one document, fraud migrates to the documents and stages still loosely checked.
For the Saudi corridor, those are exactly the areas QVP doesn’t cover.
The State as Verifier Is Here to Stay
Step back, and Saudi Arabia’s programme looks like the leading edge of a wider shift. Governments are moving from certifying stamps to verifying at source, increasingly through digital infrastructure.
India is part of that shift too. DigiLocker and the National Academic Depository let employers pull academic records directly from participating institutions, and the country’s provident fund and identity rails have made employment and identity verification far faster than a decade ago.
For employers, this is good news. It raises the floor, removes the cheapest fraud and speeds everything up.
It also tempts organisations to treat the state’s check as the whole of their duty of care. That is the borrowed trust this series has been examining all month: leaning on a check someone else ran, for a purpose that was never quite yours.
A Floor, Not a Ceiling
Saudi Arabia has built something the region needed: a state-run primary source check that makes a qualification mean what it says.
Employers hiring through the India corridor should welcome it, build their processes around it and stop duplicating what the state now does well.
But they should be clear-eyed about its edges. A cleared QVP report tells you the degree is real. It does not tell you who the person is, what they have done, or who they have become since.
The companion playbook sets out how to build on the state’s check rather than hide behind it.
