The coronavirus pandemic forced millions of people to work from home, many of them for the first time. Although many business owners were pleasantly surprised at how efficient their employees could be working from a home office, they still had to deal with everyday challenges.
Many challenges involved hiring, completing background investigations, and onboarding new employees remotely. Banks have also struggled with the new reality and have had to implement some creative online solutions to verify the identity of people opening new accounts.
Tips for Businesses to Verify the Identity of New Employees during Coronavirus
A common mistake among HR professionals is assuming that the background check service they hire also verifies the identity of every applicant. This isn’t always the case.
Companies must confirm the services they receive from a background check service and hire a separate service for identity verification if necessary. Here are some other steps employers can take to confirm the identity of job applicants before making them an employment offer:
- Verify the identity of anyone who works for the company, including independent contractors, temporary employees, part-time employees, and full-time employees. While it might be tempting to skip this step for someone only completing a short project with the company, that could be all the time they need to commit identity theft or financial crime.
- Train all employees on fraud detection and prevention. Let them know it is everyone’s responsibility to watch for and report data breaches, phishing scams, fraud, and identity theft.
- Ensure the company has a clear procedure for reporting suspicious behavior.
- Consider capturing identity data from documents issued by the government. This helps to reduce unintentional errors and deliberate misrepresentation when the prospective employee provides the documents directly.
Verification and Onboarding Challenges for Financial Institutions
Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions were slower than other industries to adopt online verification even before the coronavirus pandemic. With the need to do so suddenly thrust upon them, many financial institutions have turned to third-party organizations to assist them with both customer verification and onboarding.
Taking this approach has many benefits over in-house development that can be slow and costly due to lack of time, resources, and employees to devote to the task.
While working together with a third-party vendor, financial institutions must ensure that their business partner creates a government-compliant program. Typically, this includes strong data management, encryption, and compliance with the Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) programs at a minimum.
Online Identity Verification Benefits Both Parties
Today’s consumers demand efficiency and convenience, something that online verification easily offers. People don’t even need to leave home to apply for a job or bank account because they can upload and submit the required documents from their computer. Electronic verification is also an environmentally friendly option since it doesn’t require the use of paper at all. Illegible signatures are a thing of the past as well with people able to choose a font style and sign documents electronically.
Before hiring an identity verification service, all types of businesses should ensure it is compliant with federal and state regulations, has safeguards in place against fraud, and offers a quality assurance program that guarantees its work.
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