This story is a guest contribution from Equifax, a provider of income and employment verification solutions to simplify HR workloads and mitigate risk.
In a world of instant gratification, waiting is hard—especially if waiting means a missed opportunity. For employees who need access to credit, loans, or government benefits, manual processes for employment and income verification can create delays, leading to missed opportunities that could put your people at a disadvantage.
Using an automated solution for income and employment verification can alleviate those delays, providing benefits not only to your employees, but also to your HR department.
Here are five ways automating the employment and income verification process reduces HR’s workload and empower employees.
1. Quicker decisions for employees
Before lenders or government agencies can make qualifying decisions, they’re required to verify an applicant’s employment status and income. But the HR department, which traditionally responds to these verification requests, is usually only available during standard business hours on weekdays. Meanwhile, it’s during the weekend or afterwork hours when employees are trying to buy cars, refinance their homes, increase their credit limits, or access government assistance.
In some cases, by having to wait for HR to respond when they’re back in the office, an employee could miss out on securing a home if they can’t move quickly enough and it’s sold to another buyer. Similarly, this could delay an employee’s ability to access reliable transportation through the purchase of a car.
With automated solutions, employees get quicker decisions because verifiers have 24/7 access to current data on an applicant’s employment status and income.
2. Reduced HR workload with automated employment and income verification
Automation also frees up resources in your organization’s HR department. Instead of having to respond to calls or emails from individual verifiers, HR employers can let the solution do this work for them—even on the weekends or after hours, when many of your employees are counting on that verification.
These solutions streamline the transfer of payroll information to verifiers, minimizing administrative tasks and enabling HR to focus on strategic people management initiatives instead of playing phone tag with verifiers. Employers are totally removed from the manual process, and they no longer need to spend time on these requests.
3. Accurate and up-to-date verifications
Employers can also rest assured that the details provided by automated systems are correct. Within these solutions, payroll information should be updated during each cycle, providing accurate, up-to-date employment and income verifications. Verifiers can count on getting access to detailed salary, income, and work history information needed to make credit or program qualification decisions.
4. Integrated with your HCM system
When automated solutions are integrated with your HCM system, employee data can be seamlessly and securely exchanged between systems. Ideally, the database is updated every payroll cycle with employer-provided data in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Additionally, employee information should be protected by security credentials and certifications. These specifications reduce the risk of human error, providing both efficiency and accuracy.
5. Savings with automated employment and income verification
With less hassle for employees and their verifiers, and increased time savings for HR staff, moving to an automated verification system also creates reduced costs for the organization. UKG partners with Equifax to provide customers with income and employment verification that’s easy, efficient, and available 24/7.
Income and Employment Verification from Equifax, known as The Work Number, is used for income and employment verifications by over 2.5 million employers and has been a trusted partner of UKG for over 15 years. Our integration streamlines the verification process, at no cost from Equifax for UKG Pro™ payroll customers, which helps reduce HR’s workload and provides better access to credit, loan, and benefits verifications when employees need it. In fact, of the 223 million verifications made through Equifax’s solution in 2020, more than 23% were completed outside standard business hours or over the weekend.
This is an adapted version of an article published by Equifax, a UKG Partner. Read the original post here.