The Hidden Burden of Employment Verifications 

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or Spotify.

Key Topics Covered 

[01:13] – Why Fast Verifications Matter 

• Many verifications happen after hours or on weekends (25-30% of cases). 
• Delays can result in lost mortgage rate locks, failed car purchases, and more. 

 [06:50] – The Old Way vs. The Work Number® 

• Before: Employees track down pay stubs, and HR answers phone calls and emails. 
• Now: Automated, instant access via The Work Number®, reducing HR workload. 

[08:00] – The Growing Burden on HR Teams 

• One request may take 15-30 minutes, but in large districts, they add up fast. 
• HR staff are pulled away from strategic work to manually verify employment details. 

 [09:45] – Compliance & Security Risks in Manual Verifications 

• Verifications done manually come with legal risks and privacy concerns. 
• The Work Number® ensures verified, secure, and compliant data access. 

[12:40] – Who Pays for This Service? 

• Not school districts! The cost is covered by lenders and verifying organizations. 

 [18:05] – Real Impact on School District HR Teams 

• Many districts free up entire FTEs from admin work. 
• Feedback from employers: “I can’t believe how much time we’ve saved!” 

Resources & Links 

• Learn more about The Work Number® 
• Discover how Frontline ERP integrates with The Work Number® 

Transcript 

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for grammar and readability. 

You work in HR, so maybe you know what it’s like: one of your employees is applying for a car loan, or a mortgage. And to get that loan, the bank needs to verify their employment status and income. No problem, you’re here to help. 

But the tough part is, in a district of almost any size, these requests can really add up. Before you know it, you – or someone in your department – winds up spending hours responding to these requests. 

Matt Herbein: Any one verification may not sound like a great amount of time, 15 or 30 minutes, but when multiplied by the volume of the number of employees in any given district, this can add up to a good portion of someone’s day.

From Frontline Education, this is Field Trip. 

Frontline: Today, we are talking about something that, believe it or not, impacts almost everyone at some point in their lives. And it’s something that may not sound interesting until you actually need it, and then all of a sudden, it’s critical. And that is employment and income verification. I’m speaking with Matt Herbein from our partner, Equifax®, provider of The Work Number®, an employment verification service. 

And Matt, I just want to welcome you to Field Trip. For listeners who might not be familiar, can you explain what employment verifications are and why they’re important in today’s world? 

Matt Herbein: Yes, it’s really as the name would suggest: verifying someone’s income and employment. But why that’s so critical is, as you mentioned, in their life events at multiple stages throughout their lives, whether it’s applying for a mortgage, getting a car, or accessing credit and personal loans, they will need to confirm their income and employment. 

They’re going to need to confirm or apply with someone who needs to verify that information, and access to that credit, whether it’s a mortgage, car loan, or otherwise, will depend on the lender or verifier confirming the information they have. This enables employees to manage their financial lives at various stages throughout their lives. 

Frontline: So, let’s say I’m headed out and looking to apply for a mortgage, a car loan, or even one of those government services that require verification. What happens if I can’t get my income verified quickly? 

Matt Herbein: A mortgage is actually a really good example of this because, if you’ve ever been through that process, you know it can take a very long time. During that time, you have an interest rate that is part of your mortgage, called a rate lock. While they complete all the paperwork and process your application, your rate remains locked. 

So, if they can’t verify your income and employment, you may actually lose the interest rate that was locked in. In an extreme scenario, the mortgage closing process could be delayed so long that someone else is able to purchase the house you were trying to buy because the seller accepted another offer. 

Frontline: And how did this work before? Let’s say I’m out on a weekend or in the evening trying to make this happen. I would imagine that previously, the verifying organization would call my employer. But what happens if no one’s there? That strikes me as something that could create real issues. 

Matt Herbein: Yes, and you nailed it. Take the car application process, for example. Someone is out shopping for a car, and typically, they’re doing that after work or over the weekend. As you would expect, this is very common. In fact, roughly 25 to 30% of verifications happen after hours or on the weekend. 

Without automated verifications enabled through The Work Number®, the alternative is to ask the employee to dig up pay stubs or contact their employer. But if it’s after hours or the weekend, their employer may be unavailable to confirm the information over the phone, via email, or by fax. 

In that scenario, when you’re out car shopping after hours or on the weekend, you often won’t be able to drive home in the car if the lender relies on manual verifications instead of automated ones enabled by The Work Number®. 

Frontline: Matt, have you had an opportunity to speak with people who have landed in a difficult spot because they weren’t able to get these verifications in the way they needed? 

Matt Herbein: Yes, we actually work with a population of people traditionally known as subprime or low prime. What we find is that verifications from The Work Number® enable a group of people who may have low credit scores but have the income necessary to support the credit they’re seeking. They are often overlooked by traditional finance companies that focus solely on credit scores. 

However, when we introduce not just credit but also confirmed and verified income and employment, these individuals gain better access to credit. At Equifax®, we’re really passionate about making this not just about verification for the lender but also about empowering applicants. This allows them to be included in the financial process in ways they weren’t before when lenders only looked at credit scores. 

Frontline: We’ve been talking about the issue of what happens when I can’t get immediate credit or employment verification. But what happens if my employer makes a mistake? What kind of impact could that have on me as a person or on the process I’m trying to go through? 

Matt Herbein: Yeah, so if you’re unable to get the loan approved because, for example, they weren’t able to confirm the information—or if, as you say, they made an error and didn’t confirm something that should have been confirmed—both scenarios are possible when verification isn’t automated directly from the source data, which is the payroll system. 

Then, there are all kinds of compounding effects. Take one example: let’s say you’re trying to access a personal loan at a reasonable interest rate that fits within your budget for an urgent home improvement. Especially now, with Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, you may need a loan for that purpose. 

Frontline: That makes sense. Up until this point, we’ve been talking about this from the perspective of the employee who needs the verification. But I want to take a moment to look at it from the employer’s side. 

What role do employers play in ensuring that their people have quick and secure access to verifications? 

Matt Herbein: That’s actually one of the reasons why the partnership with Frontline is so valuable to employers. The only role they have to play is opting into the service and say they want to participate as a contributor to The Work Number®. Once they do, their employees will be in the database and accessible to verifiers as they apply for mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and various government benefits. 

Now, their information is available for instant verification, whether after hours or on weekends. Employers simply need to make their data accessible by opting into the service through our partnership with Frontline. 

Frontline: Our audience consists of people who work in school districts. For an employer like a school district, maybe one with several hundred or even several thousand employees, what kind of work does handling employment verifications require from an HR or payroll department? 

Matt Herbein: In that kind of manual process, before you see the benefits of automation that are available from The Work Number®, if you just think through the verifiers contacting you directly, whether that’s via email or over the phone, you’re now having to devote resources from your staff to doing back-office administrative work. 

Any one verification may not sound like a great amount of time—15 or 30 minutes—but multiplied by the volume of the number of employees in any given district, this can add up to a good portion of someone’s day. That’s all back-office administrative work. That individual would be much better off using their time toward things that will actually meet the mission of the district if they didn’t have to spend that time doing this back-office administrative work of fulfilling these verification requests. 

Frontline: What kind of volume are we talking about there for a given employer? How often might they expect to do something like this? 

Matt Herbein: It obviously will be a function of how many employees you have, but a good rule of thumb that we typically see is that any given employee is probably going to generate between one and a half and three verifications per year. So, take your population and multiply that out—you can think through traditional volumes, and essentially, all of that is work that could be automated and taken away from the back office through The Work Number® service. 

Frontline: Yeah. Are there any specific legal issues or compliance issues that employers face in this process? And I’m thinking whether that might mean maintaining data security, data privacy. Are there any scenarios where employers could be on the hook for something if the way that they went about doing verifications didn’t take care of employee data privacy? 

Matt Herbein: So yeah, in the kind of manual process, think about this—you get a call from some car dealership, and they say, “Hey, I’ve got John here. He says he works for you and makes $50,000. Is that correct? Can you provide me with that confirmation?” 

In that scenario, you now have a lot of liability associated with this because you don’t have the ability to know for sure that the car dealership is, in fact, operating in good faith, that this is driven by the employee’s consent, that they are actually applying for something, and that they have given their consent to the organization. Nor do you know that the person requesting the data will be carefully protecting it in the way required by legislation for PII. 

So yes, there’s a lot of risk and liability that comes with doing something manually in offline ways, as opposed to the automated service enabled through The Work Number®. 

Frontline: So I know that Equifax® offers The Work Number® as a service to employers to handle employment verifications automatically. And I should note that this is available to school districts that are Frontline ERP clients because Frontline has a partnership with Equifax® that comes at no cost to school districts. 

If I’m an employee and I’m going out to apply for a loan or a service, they say, “We need to verify your employment.” I give them The Work Number® information. They contact The Work Number®, which is connected with Frontline ERP. They’re able to say, “Yes, we can validate and verify this employment and all of the information that’s required for the loan or the service.” 

And that happens, you said, instantaneously, right? That happens 24/7, right away, and it doesn’t need to go through the staff at the school district. 

Matt Herbein: And in fact, it’s even easier than that because you mentioned the employee would provide The Work Number® information. The vast majority of the time, all they are going to do is provide their Social Security number the same way they would on any application. Then they are going to be found in The Work Number® database, which the verifier is already searching, and now they will just find the record. 

Whereas if that employer weren’t contributing, they wouldn’t have found the record and would have to fall back to the option of calling. So the employees don’t need to do anything extra or special to take advantage of this because they are just going to be available and accessible to the verifier since their employer has opted into the service and their data is accessible. 

Frontline: So I know that some people might be listening to this and thinking, “Look, nothing’s free. You told me this comes at no cost to school districts, but this service clearly took a lot of expertise to create and run. So who pays for it?” 

Matt Herbein: The group that’s paying for it is those verifiers because their alternative is to be on the other side of that phone call and use their own time to track down this information. 

And then, even if they do succeed in tracking down the information, they may now be dealing with paper pay stubs. They may be having to deal with faxes, emails, and phone calls on their side. So it’s taking their time away from what they would rather be doing, which is closing as many loans or approving as many applications as possible. 

So they’re actually quite happy to receive this service in such a way that they’re getting confirmed data straight from the source in an instant, automated process as opposed to the alternative—which, as we’ve already said, creates a lot of problems on the employer side but also creates a lot of problems on the verifier side. 

Frontline: So we live in a world where our data is being used all the time, right? You go on Google, and they’re serving up ads because they can track your search patterns and whatnot. And so I think that for many people, they may not fully understand how their data is being used and how it might be used when they go and apply for a loan or for services. 

Can you talk a little bit about how The Work Number® keeps that PII, that employee data, safe? And I know part of that is confirming the legitimacy of verifying organizations. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that too. 

Matt Herbein: Of course. As you can imagine, safeguarding employee data is critical to HR professionals, and it’s even more critical to Equifax® because it’s key to our business. So we make significant investments in protecting that data. 

One of those investments is what you mentioned—verifying that anybody with access to the data meets security standards. So what we do is something called a credentialing process. That process helps validate that the organization requesting access to The Work Number® meets those requirements. 

They are subject to audits where the information they provide is confirmed. We ensure that, at the time of application, they are collecting the permissible purpose associated with their data access. Whether that’s obtaining consent at the time of application or any other way in which the employee gives permission, we have processes to ensure that verifiers are documenting all of that. We also maintain full audit trails to ensure it has been completed. 

Frontline: How does something like The Work Number® support people who may be in vulnerable situations, like those who might be seeking government assistance? How do fast verifications make a difference in their lives? 

Matt Herbein: In the government assistance category, there are a number of programs that utilize The Work Number® to verify eligibility. So you can think about programs like SNAP, formerly known as food stamps; TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; housing subsidies; workforce development; and disability programs. 

There’s a whole range of programs that utilize The Work Number® to confirm eligibility, and with that, we are able to speed up the process. What might otherwise take months can now be completed much more quickly—and in a way that protects privacy. 

If you put yourself in the shoes of an employee who needs that kind of assistance, there’s no shame in it, but they probably don’t want to call special attention to their employer that they’re in need of that assistance. Without the automated process enabled by The Work Number®, their employer would end up in the middle of that eligibility determination with the government agency and would be fully aware of their situation. 

By allowing the eligibility determination to go through The Work Number®, their privacy can be protected, and they can gain much faster access to the benefits they need. 

Frontline: What kind of feedback have you received from employers using The Work Number®? I’m thinking of how it helps them take care of their employees, how it helps ease the burden on their HR teams—but what kind of stuff have you heard? 

Matt Herbein: One of the things we do is provide access to reports on the number of verifications handled on behalf of an employer. And so, oftentimes, we hear people really impressed with the volume that has been removed from their back office. 

You don’t always have visibility into how many transactions were happening once they’re removed. But we then enable access to just how many verifications have been handled for an organization, and we often hear things like, “Geez, that’s way more than I anticipated,” or, “I can’t believe I’m able to free up this much time because of your service.” 

And again, going back to the idea that it’s absolutely no cost, it’s really one of the best things a company can do. When you consider that it costs nothing to free up resources and put effort behind things that actually align with strategies and drive growth—rather than having that effort tied up in administrative back-office work—it’s a huge benefit. 

So the feedback we hear is often, “I just can’t believe how valuable this is, and yet I don’t even have to pay for it.” There are very few opportunities like that available to employers. 

Frontline: Earlier in the conversation, you were talking a little bit about the amount of time that these verifications typically take—anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes or more. How much time can an employer free up from its HR team? How much time, on average, are they freeing up? 

Matt Herbein: It clearly depends on the size of the organization since that’s the main driver of how many verifications come in from their employees. But we’ve seen some of the larger organizations that previously had back-office staff of four or five—or sometimes even up to 10—individuals handling this. It may not have been their full-time job, but it was a significant chunk of their job. 

With The Work Number®, they are ultimately able to free up entire FTEs to work on more valuable, more strategic efforts instead of this back-office administrative work. 

Frontline: Awesome. Matt Herbein has been speaking with us from Equifax®, a partner of Frontline Education. Matt, I just want to thank you for your time today. This is really interesting stuff. 

Matt Herbein: No, thank you. Very happy to have been here, and we look forward to continuing to grow the partnership with Frontline. 

Frontline: If you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or pretty much anywhere else you listen to podcasts. 

Check it out. For Frontline Education, I’m Ryan Estes. Thanks for listening and have a great day.