Employment Verifications and Student Loan Forgiveness

The Work Number requires that verifiers have the documented consent of the employee-consumer to access income information. Consent is generally established via a signed acknowledgement at the point of application for a loan or service. And, as with all verifications via The Work Number, the verifier will need to state a Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) compliant permissible purpose prior to accessing the data. In most instances, the employee’s consent to have income verified is attained by the verifier during the application process. However, an additional consent mechanism available through The Work Number is the Salary Key.

In most instances, the employee’s consent to have income verified is attained by the verifier during the application process. However, an additional consent mechanism available through The Work Number is the Salary Key.

To generate a Salary Key, go to www.theworknumber.com/employees or call 800.367.2884. You will be prompted to enter MMSD's employer code, 19169 and your User ID and PIN. Once logged in, you will select the option to create a Salary Key and the system will generate a 6-digit random number. The Salary Key is displayed or voiced to you. It is a single use code, and you must create a new Salary Key for each income verification needed. You may have up to three codes active at one time.

If logging into The Work Number for the first time, you will use a default User ID and PIN combination.

ID: Employee "b" number (6 digits)
PIN: 10 + employee "b" number (8 digits, 10xxxxxx)

For security purposes, you will be immediate required to set up account verification as well as setting a secure PIN, prior to being able to access any of your information.

MMSD's employer code is 19169. This five-digit code is used to identify each organization in The Work Number database. Credentialed verifiers can also search for employer codes by name.

The commitment to information security at Equifax is unparalleled. Equifax is SSAE16, FISMA NIST 800-53 and ISO 27001 certified. They employ risk-based authentication and data encryption technologies and house The Work Number data in an isolated network. The Work Number has a detailed privacy policy that tells you what they do, and more importantly, what they do not do with information they gather while you are on their websites.

A verifier can be any lending institution, property manager or other business with a Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA)-compliant permissible purpose for requesting employment or income information. All verifiers are screened and credentialed by Equifax before receiving system access, and authenticated at each login.

Data for new employees or future hires is provided to The Work Number for Verifications of Employment. Payroll data will not appear until a payroll is run that includes pay for the new employee. If an employee is a future hire or rehire, the Total Time with Employer will be displayed as a negative value because they have not yet started employment.

Handling employment and income verifications in-house requires HR staff dedicated to this activity. In addition to the labor-related cost, it also exposes our organization to liability, as unknowingly providing sensitive employee information to a non-authorized requestor could result in violations of privacy regulations and potentially result in lawsuits. Using The Work Number effectively eliminates the work and the liability associated with providing verifications. It also frees-up our staff to focus on other critical HR functions.

Having data on The Work Number database benefits you as well in that, you can have verifications performed 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, instantly and securely. This facilitates on-the-spot financing decisions, and eliminates the need for you to provide paystubs or other documentation—the verifier gets the information they need directly from the database.

Verifiers pay a fee to obtain employment and income verifications from The Work Number. The practice of paying a fee for employment verification is widely accepted and generally taken from the loan- processing fee that most lending institutions or property managers charge for loan or rental applications. Verifiers largely prefer this method of obtaining information and are willing to pay for the service, as it dramatically accelerates their processing time and results in operational cost savings for them as well.

Data available to verifiers includes:

• employee name
• hire date
• termination date (if no longer employed)
• total time with MMSD
• job title
• rate of pay
• 3 years of pay history