Authenticity, and the question nobody likes asking

Did this person do this work.

Supplied evidence was produced outside the assessor's control, which means the question of whether the applicant actually did it is live in a way it is not for a supervised task. It is an uncomfortable question because asking it implies suspicion of somebody who has done nothing wrong, and it is unavoidable.

The practical resolution is usually not interrogation but corroboration. A competency conversation in which the applicant explains the work, the decisions they made and what they would do differently reveals authorship quickly and without accusation, because a person who did the work can discuss it in a way that somebody presenting another person's work cannot.

Third party verification does the rest. A supervisor confirming specific performance, rather than general employment, is the single most useful item in most recognition files, and obtaining it is worth the administrative effort it costs.

Where evidence is a team product, which much workplace evidence is, the question becomes what this person contributed. That should be documented explicitly rather than left implicit, because a file that attributes a team output to an individual is weak in a way that will be found.

There is one authenticity check that is both simple and rarely used, which is asking the applicant to produce something new. A small task performed now, observed or recorded, resolves questions about historical evidence directly and takes far less time than chasing verification of a document from six years ago. It is also more comfortable for everybody than an investigation into authorship.