Rapid Reporting Announces EmploymentChek, the Industry’s First Third-Party Employment Verification Using Verbal Verification of Employment (VVOE)
VVOE boosts reliability of employment verifications, traditionally one of the most difficult and challenging aspects of fraud prevention for lenders

Rapid Reporting, an award-winning innovator of income and identity verification products to the mortgage industry, has announced the upcoming release of EmploymentChek, the mortgage industry’s first third-party employment verification service offering verbal verification of employment (VVOE). VVOE picks up where automated employment verification services leave off by providing confirmations that come from live, person-to-person contact with the employer. With EmploymentChek, lenders and brokers can get definitive answers on a borrower’s employment in 24 hours or less, thereby protecting themselves in one of the most challenging aspects of fraud detection.

All mortgage loans contain four major risk factors for fraud: identity, income, employment and collateral. The mortgage industry is particularly challenged by employment fraud because of the labor-intensive and paper-laden, manual process of verification, which opens lenders up to a variety of errors, oversights and opportunities for fraud. In most mortgage shops, the verification process is not measurable or accountable, and the mortgage companies do not capture the data. Rapid Reporting’s EmploymentChek solves those issues with a process that validates the existence of the employer thorough a search of public and private records, and also provides a person-to-person verbal verification of employment conducted by a trained employment fraud specialist. “The old-school ways of verifying employment leave lenders exposed to a variety of fraud, not to mention slow turn-around times and higher costs of doing business,” explains Jay Meadows, CEO for Rapid Reporting. “What we’ve done is create a reliable and consistent process that benefits from the stability and uniformity of constant repetition. Lenders get a definitive answer on employment verification based on thorough research by fraud prevention specialists—all with a few mouse clicks, and in less than 24 hours.”

Especially with the strain of today’s challenging market, many lenders are finding the employment verification process tedious and time consuming, not to mention a strain on the skills of their underwriting teams. “There’s the issue of labor efficiency. At the rate underwriters are getting paid, doing employment verification isn’t exactly the best use of their time,” explains Meadows. “And since there aren’t a whole lot of junior underwriters in the business, this work often gets delegated to temporary workers, which presents a huge risk factor. Counting on employees with many other duties—those that might not be committed to proper execution of the verification process—opens an opportunity for fraud to leak into the business. How employment verifications are obtained can literally mean the difference between catching a bad loan or getting a buy-back or foreclosure down the road.”

In order to use Rapid Reporting’s EmploymentChek service, users simply log on to their Rapid Reporting web-based application, select VVOE, and provide the relevant information, such as the borrower’s name, employment information and social security number. Rapid Reporting receives the information and begins working on the file, running the information through multiple systems containing billions of public and private records. It is then assigned a risk rating based on the viability of the employer. At this point, the information is relayed to Rapid Reporting’s customer service center, where a highly trained specialist calls the employer and verifies employment of the borrower. The lender can rest assured knowing that a reliable and consistent process has been implemented, and can therefore depend on the information, which can be reviewed manually or fed to their loan origination systems.

The client is welcome to listen in on Rapid Reporting’s verification calls, and all calls are thoroughly debriefed, with survey reports readily available to the user. “Whether the lender chooses to listen in on the call, review our debriefing reports, or a combination of the two, they get information that’s in many cases much more thorough than they’d get on their own,” says Meadows. “Lenders can get the pertinent details of each call, such as whether the phone was answered with a business name, or if there were non-professional sounds like a television or a baby crying in the background, which are all red flags. Lenders and management will also have the ability to listen to the recording of the entire VVOE call for up to 30 days.”

“We’ve been working on developing EmploymentChek for over a year, and virtually every underwriter we’ve spoken to has been eagerly anticipating its release,” says Meadows. “With EmploymentChek and VVOE, lenders get speed and reliability, along with the assurance of specialized, accountable, third-party verification, all for a price that’s less than what it would cost them to do this in-house.”

Rapid Reporting’s EmploymentChek will be available in the fourth quarter of 2008.

About Rapid Reporting
Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, Rapid Reporting Verification Company is a national provider of definitive income and identity verification products for mortgage lenders to help combat fraud. In 2007, the company won the 2007 Fix-It Award for a technology solution that solves an industry problem. Core offerings include IncomeChek, which is used to verify income through information obtained from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and DirectChek, which meets USA Patriot Act compliance and verifies identity via a direct comparison of the SSN to the Social Security Administration (SSA) database and searches of over 15 billion records in public and private databases for identity fraud and abuse. Both products operate over a secure Web-based portal, which is audited daily for security purposes and are also available through RapidChek, the company’s Web Services platform providing business-to-business connectivity for process automation and electronic data exchange. Rapid Reporting formed and continues to build relationships with government agencies, such as the IRS and the Social Security Administration (SSA), to gather electronic data for verification purposes. Rapid Reporting’s executive team led the successful lobbying efforts to secure the continuation of the enumeration verification system (EVS) with the SSA database. For additional information, email Info@RapidReporting.com, call 888.749.4411 or visit www.RapidReporting.com .