Dear IAPE members and sponsors,

This month will mark a great achievement by your association, the International Association for Property and Evidence. It will assist the property and evidence management profession to make a quantum leap forward. It will provide a tool for all area and state Property and Evidence Associations to use in their efforts to raise professional standards on that level. It also will serve as a measuring rod for individual Property Specialists serving in isolated locations or in extremely small departments. Another thing it will do is to provide a source of justifiable pride for Property Specialists across the world who have taken it upon themselves to set high professional standards through education, innovation, cooperation and experience.

What single catalyst can make such a significant mark on our profession? Certification!

Starting July 1, 2003 the International Association for Property and Evidence will certify Property and Evidence Specialists who meet a combination of training, experience and tested knowledge. The Certified Property and Evidence Specialist (CPES) certification will let everyone know that the person holding it is an experienced property and evidence professional who has a year or more of full-time property room experience, has attended the two-day IAPE Property and Evidence Management class, and who has passed an examination to confirm their understanding of the underlying principles of the profession.

Your IAPE Board of Directors has been working for almost three years to bring certification to our profession, and early in the process they identified two huge obstacles that had to be overcome.

The first issue was that there were no accepted standards to be used as a basis upon which to say which practices were right and which were wrong in property and evidence management. The IAPE class outline for years has been built on a composite of the few documents in the field that purported to set standards, but there was no one standard. To resolve that issue, the Board resolved to develop a set of IAPE standards for Property Room operation. With much research, days of discussion, and countless revisions, the Board accepted a formal set of standards for Property Room Operation late in 2002. You can download them all from the IAPE website at

The second issue was to create a process that would allow standardized testing of applicants without forcing upon them the expense and inconvenience of traveling to one of a group of testing centers geographically distributed across the country. That issue was overcome via technology, and IAPE now has contracted with Kiley Associates to conduct on-line testing of applicants. Now all that is required to take the test once the arrangements are made is an hour's worth of internet access. Kiley Associates specializes in internet education and testing, and has been working with the Board from the inception of the certification process.

Each applicant will have a different test generated for them by the computer program. Each test will include questions in each of the core categories which the board felt were necessary to provide a well rounded assessment of the applicant's knowledge. The specific questions, however will be generated by random selections from the questions available in the database.

I think this is the first time that I have devoted my entire column to a single issue. I hope you agree that your Board of Directors' work over the past few years has been justified. Please see Page 8 for a complete explanation of the process, and then Page 9 for an application. Who will the leaders be?

Sincerely,