Fences establish boundaries that can ultimately protect you from what’s on the other side. In the movie ‘The Sandlot,’ a group of neighborhood kids must deal with the legendary ball-eating dog, affectionately known as ‘The Beast’, who resides at the back of the sandlot where baseball is played. Scotty Smalls borrows a baseball from his dad that happens to be signed by some female who went by the name ‘Babe Ruth.’ Scotty hits his first homerun clear out of the sandlot and into Mr. Mertle’s junkyard…where The Beast resides. The boys, horrified that a baseball signed by Babe Ruth would be lost, must now decide if it is worth the risk to jump the fence and retrieve the ball with the possibility of being attacked by the guard dog. Benny Rodriguez is the unfortunate boy picked for the task. I’ll let you watch the movie to learn the rest.
Compliance resembles the fence in The Sandlot. However, when we talk about compliance as it relates to employment and income verification requests, it’s important to distinguish between compliance with your organization’s corporate policy and compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). For this post, we’ll look at compliance with your corporate policy.
Corporate Compliance
It can be very difficult to track and ensure that every person that touches a verification request, in all departments that are involved in the process (HR/Payroll/Benefits), at multiple locations is responding to verification requests per corporate policy.
Do you keep track of the number of verification requests? Does your staff track down each employee to confirm that the request is legitimate? Do you keep a record of each verification? If your policy states that all verifications should be sent to a central location, how do you ensure this happening? If your policy states that only certain data elements are to be released to verifiers, how do you ensure this is the only data being released? Most companies require an employee signature to release income information, where are you keeping these consent forms and are you comparing that signature with the signature in an employee’s file to ensure it hasn’t been forged?
This is where Verifent helps ensure corporate compliance. When requests are made through the Verifent portal, you now have an audit trail of that verification including what data was provided to the verifier. Additionally, in the ten-minute setup process, you (the employer) choose which data elements are allowed to be provided to the verifier based on the type of verification request. This provides the proverbial fence around the process so that locations will not hand out subjective information and/or additional data not in compliance with your corporate policy.