Administration
- Certification
- Accredited Trust and Fiduciary Advisor (ATFA)
- Administered by
- Campbell University · Trust Education Foundation
- CE review
- ATFA CE Review Committee
- Correspondence
- submissions@atfacertification.com
How authority is arranged
The certification separates the work of preparing a recommendation from the authority to decide. A Director prepares, researches, and recommends. A standing Committee decides. There is no mechanism by which a recommendation becomes a decision without the Committee, and the underlying records deliberately contain no field in which a Director could record one — because a field like that would eventually get used.
Ratification is by negative consent: the full Committee receives the report with its supporting evidence and has five business days to object. Silence ratifies. Any objection removes that item from the batch for discussion.
Why decisions are written down
Every ruling is recorded with four things: the question, the decision, the reasoning, and the alternatives that were considered and rejected. The last of those is the one usually omitted elsewhere, and the one that makes a register worth keeping — a year later, the question is rarely “what did we decide” but “did we already think about this.”
Where a decision has public consequence, it carries plain-language text that is published on the questions and answers page. Both come from the same record, so they cannot drift apart.
The data behind the review
Programs, providers, and submissions are held in a small documented schema rather than a spreadsheet of conventions. Tier lives on the provider. Every spelling of a provider's name ever received is mapped back to a canonical record, so matching improves with each cycle instead of resetting.
Records distinguish three kinds of blank, and the distinction drives what happens next: an empty field means not yet researched, NONE means researched and confirmed absent, and N/A means not applicable to this record. Collapsing them would lose the difference between work outstanding and work done.
providers and inherited by every session from that provider.