In 1990 the band Tesla popularized the song Signs, originally written by the Canadian rock band Five Man Electrical Band. Read part of the song’s lyrics:
“Oh say now mister can't you read
You got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat
You can't watch no you can't eat you ain't supposed to be here
And the sign says you got to have a membership card to get inside”
Three of the four owners of Verifent are First Responders. As a First Responder, if your information isn’t in ‘the system,’ it doesn’t matter how trained up and qualified you are, you will not be able to ‘get behind the barriers’ to help. Credentialing is everywhere.
Clearly, as a society, we understand the necessity of vetting people and ensuring they meet certain standards prior to granting them access to whatever it is we seek to protect. This principle is just as relevant to the employment and income verification process as any other business process.
But, I’m willing to bet that if you are still responding to employment verifications the way everyone did in the 1990s (phone, fax, email, and snail-mail) you have no way of proving who you are releasing your employee’s sensitive information to. Sure, you might call your employees to ensure the verification is from a real organization, but that’s hardly efficient. Is trusting letterhead, in the world of Photoshop, the best option? Are you really pulling an employee file to compare an employee’s signature on a consent form to ensure that it hasn’t been forged?
This is why credentialing is built into Verifent’s employment and income verification service. Through Verifent, employers can have peace of mind knowing that the requesting entity, the verifier, is a legitimate business with a legitimate business reason to obtain a verification request. By the way, that’s called Permissible Purpose under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)…More on that in a later post.
Understanding exactly who the verifier is and why they want an employment verification inevitably increases data security in your process. Through Verifent, imposters acting like legitimate verifiers, will not gain access to your employee’s information…they simply won’t be allowed in our system, because we vet them beforehand.
Put another way:
“Oh say now verifier can’t you read
You got to have Permissible Purpose to see
You can’t access no you can’t see IF you ain’t supposed to be here
And the sign says a verifier’s got to be credentialed to get inside”
Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to speak to Verifent about your current process.