As a mortgage lender, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your borrowers can afford to pay back their loans on time. Part of this process involves verifying their income and employment.
Unfortunately, you can’t simply rely on applicants’ claims that they earn an adequate income at their current job. You need to corroborate their claims to ensure they truly meet your mortgage qualifications.
Below, we’ll discuss the importance of verification of income and employment (VOE) in greater detail. We’ll also highlight how automating your VOE strategy can save you time and streamline your workflows.
Table of Contents
Why Does VOE Matter?
Verifications are a crucial tool for ensuring your borrowers qualify for their mortgages. The need for VOE became acutely apparent after the mortgage crisis of 2008. Prior to this crisis, many aspiring homeowners got approved for stated-income mortgages.[i] In other words, no one took the time to verify their income or employment, leading to a number of borrowers defaulting on their loans.
Fast forward to today, and lenders are required to verify borrowers’ documented income and employment,[ii] thanks to the Dodd-Frank Act.[iii] Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 to prevent future housing crises.
The Dodd-Frank Act requires lenders to make reasonable efforts to ensure their borrowers can pay their mortgages on time, such as verifying their income and employment. This legislation highlights how VOE protects the integrity of the mortgage industry and everyone who participates in it, from aspiring homeowners to secondary market investors.
Verify Before You Build the Deal
Before diving into the traditional VOE methods lenders rely on today, it’s worth understanding a newer approach that shifts verification earlier in the process entirely: prequalification-stage income and employment insights.
Income Qualify, powered by Equifax and The Work Number, gives lenders verified income and employment data before a worksheet is ever built. At the prequalification stage, Income Qualify returns four key data points: name and SSN verification, employer name sourced directly from payroll providers, tenure (so you know which Work Number report to order and whether you need one or two), and prior year total income for directional debt-to-income confidence.
This matters because one of the most common and costly problems in mortgage lending is spending time and money building out a deal only to discover a verification gap later. Income Qualify helps you catch income mismatches, confirm record availability, and prioritize the borrowers most likely to close before committing resources to the full VOE process.
Income Qualify is free for existing Work Number users and takes minutes to enable.
4 Common Traditional VOE Methods
Thanks to technological advancements, many lenders are choosing to automate their VOE process in 2026. However, some lenders still rely on a variety of manual or semi-manual strategies.Here are four of the most common manual VOE methods used in the mortgage industry today:
#1 Borrower-Provided Documentation
Some lenders start the VOE process by asking their applicants to provide documentation to support their income and employment claims. For example, they may request recent pay stubs, W-2 forms, or bank statements showing payroll deposits.
While this method is straightforward, it comes with the following drawbacks:
- Borrower friction – This type of VOE places the burden of gathering and submitting documents on your borrowers, which can negatively affect their customer experience.
- Mortgage fraud risk – It can also increase your exposure to mortgage fraud. After all, falsifying pay stubs, bank statements, and employment letters has never been easier, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Fannie Mae also found that a growing number of fake employers have listings in credible online business directories, amplifying the detection difficulties.
Read More: Mortgage Fraud Trends in the Age of AI: What Lenders Need to Know in 2026
#2 Employer VOE
Another traditional VOE strategy involves contacting an applicant’s employer to confirm their income and employment status. With this approach, a member of your team calls the employer to verify details, such as the borrower’s job title, salary, and length of employment.
While this method can obtain confirmation directly from the source, it often requires significant time and effort. Employers may be difficult to reach, unavailable outside of normal business hours, or unwilling to share employee information.
Additionally, many secondary market investors prefer verifications obtained through independent third-party sources.
Read More: The Secondary Mortgage Market: How Can You Ensure Your Loans Meet Investor Requirements?
#3 Consumer-Permissioned Data VOE
Consumer permission VOE leverages consumer permission data (CPD) to offer a more secure, borrower-led approach to verifications. With this method, you request a verification through a CPD vendor, and your borrower authorizes that vendor to access their payroll provider or personal financial accounts.
Once the borrower securely logs in and grants permission, the vendor will retrieve their verified income and employment data on your behalf, only sharing the details that are necessary for your request.
Since borrowers explicitly authorize this data access, this method can help support a more borrower-driven experience while addressing growing concerns around data privacy and control. Consumer-permissioned VOE can also help close verification gaps, allowing applicants who work as gig workers, contract employees, or business owners to reliably verify their income despite a lack of traditional employment records.
Read More: 6 Benefits of Integrating Consumer Permission VOE into Your Cascade VOE Flow
#4 Third-Party Employment Databases
Third-party vendors allow lenders to circumvent their applicants and employers altogether. Some popular providers include The Work Number by Equifax, Experian Verify, and Citadel. Also known as “instant-hit” providers, these vendors amass hundreds of thousands of employment records from HR systems and payroll providers.
Equifax also offers a tool designed to help you get more out of your instant-hit queries before you even place a full verification order. The Work Number Report Indicator is delivered alongside the Equifax Mortgage Prequalification Credit Report, providing a simple yes or no flag that tells you whether a standard VOIE record exists for your borrower in The Work Number database. Knowing this upfront helps you avoid ordering reports that won’t return hits, segment your borrowers more efficiently, and better predict your cost to close.
To access these records, lenders simply submit a verification request with the vendor and wait for them to confirm whether a matching employment record exists for their applicant. If the vendor finds a record, the lender can quickly verify the income and employment details.
However, instant-hit vendors don’t provide universal coverage. Some borrowers may fall outside of their large employment databases, particularly those with alternative employment arrangements, such as gig workers, independent contractors, or self-employed business owners.
If your first vendor fails to return a hit for your applicant, you may need to repeat the process with additional vendors or ultimately fall back on other verification methods, which can slow down your workflows.
The Downsides of Traditional VOE
While the methods above remain widely used across the mortgage industry, they often introduce operational inefficiencies and verification gaps when used in isolation. Compared to automated VOE, these methods can be:
- Time-consuming – Managing applicant paperwork, tracking down employers, and navigating multiple instant-hit systems can be complicated and time-consuming.
- Restrictive – If an employer is hard to reach, out of the office, or no longer a part of the company, your manual VOE endeavors can experience unexpected delays.
- Vulnerable to fraud – Manual VOE is more prone to mortgage fraud, since borrowers can always falsify documents or create fake employers.
- Error-prone – Manual VOE is also more susceptible to accidental errors. Employers may unintentionally relay inaccurate information, or your staff may improperly transcribe details from their conversations.
- Ineffective – Even with all of the time and effort that goes into manual VOE, its hit rate isn’t that high. Your hit rate can be as low as 50% if you only consult with a single third-party vendor.
Rather than dealing with the downsides of manual VOE, you can streamline your VOE process significantly by embracing automation.
What is Automated VOE?
Automated VOE is a verification method that allows you to automatically request and manage verifications across multiple VOE providers within a single workflow. In turn, you can finally stop wasting time contacting applicants’ employers and juggling various third-party providers’ systems.
To automate your VOE process, simply implement an automated solution, like Cascade VOE. This tool uses a multi-level cascade to request verifications from various vendors one by one until it returns a hit. It allows you to:
- Select your preferred vendors from a growing list of instant-hit and CPD providers.
- Arrange these vendors in your preferred order.
- Only pay for a vendor’s report when it actually returns a hit.
After customizing your settings, Cascade VOE will cycle through your custom cascade for your applicants, moving seamlessly onto the next in the list until it completes the process. Once Cascade VOE returns a hit, you’ll be notified right away within your loan origination system (LOS) or via SMS/text or email.
If your list of vendors can’t verify a specific applicant, Cascade VOE will automatically send the verification request to Certified Credit’s manual VOE team, and we’ll promptly handle the manual verification on your behalf, delivering most verifications within 48 to 72 hours.
Read More: From Paperwork to Precision: The Tech-Savvy Future of VOE
How Long Does Cascade VOE Take to Verify?
The time it takes for Cascade VOE to return hits can vary depending on the vendors you choose to integrate into your customized cascade. If you select vendors that offer Day 1 Certainty, such as ExperianVerify and The Work Number,[iv] you can enjoy the peace of mind that you’ll always receive same-day hits. Even without Day 1 Certainty, Cascade VOE returns much faster hits than you could obtain manually.
The Benefits of Automated VOE
Automating your VOE strategy offers many advantages. With Cascade VOE, you’ll enjoy:
- Streamlined workflows – Cascade VOE lets you access multiple leading vendors from one place, preventing the need to juggle separate systems or remember multiple logins.
- Faster hits – Since Cascade VOE can request verifications from one vendor after another automatically, you can get hits faster with less work.
- Higher hit rate – On average, Cascade VOE clients see hit rate increases of 20% to 30% within the very first year.
- Third-party verifications – Cascade VOE can verify your borrowers’ income and employment with third-party vendors on your behalf, keeping the entire process at arm’s length and satisfying secondary market investors’ expectations.
- Automated alerts – Rather than wondering if your verifications are done yet, Cascade VOE enables you to focus your attention on other tasks, knowing you’ll receive prompt alerts as soon as your verifications are complete.
- Customized alerts – Cascade VOE lets you customize how you receive your notifications. You can choose to receive them via SMS/text, email, or within your LOS. Getting VOE alerts on your phone can come in handy if you find yourself out of the office frequently. You can also have VOE hits sent to multiple people within your mortgage lending company.
- Lower VOE costs – Since you only pay for verifications when they return hits, Cascade VOE can increase your hit rate while simultaneously lowering your verification costs. You can also customize your Cascade VOE settings to reach out to lower-cost vendors first.
- Smarter spend decisions – Before you order a full VOIE report through The Work Number, Equifax’s Work Number Report Indicator can tell you whether a record exists for your borrower. This upfront visibility helps you avoid paying for verifications that won’t return results, so your verification budget goes further.
As you can see, Cascade VOE can free you from the drudgery of manual VOE while enhancing your efficiency and boosting your bottom line.
Read More: Why Your Ordering Options Matter: How to Speed Up Verifications & Save Money
Cascade VOE Example
To showcase the benefits of Cascade VOE in action, let’s consider an example. John Brokerman wants to verify his potential borrowers’ income and employment. He signs into his LOS and navigates to the Cascade VOE tool.
Before John even opens Cascade VOE, he could take things a step further with Income Qualify. At the prequalification stage, Income Qualify would confirm whether a Work Number record exists for his borrower, verify their employer name and tenure, and return prior year income for a directional DTI read. Armed with that information, John would already know which type of VOE to order and whether the deal is worth pursuing before Cascade VOE runs its first query.
Once he’s ready to pull the full VOE, he selects the borrower authorization (this may be associated automatically) and chooses the type of VOE he wants to order, whether that’s VOE, VOI/E, one year, two years, etc.
After inputting the necessary information, John lets Cascade VOE work its magic and attends to other tasks. While John’s away, Cascade VOE starts with his first vendor, Experian Verify, but it comes up short. Next, Cascade VOE tries John’s second vendor, The Work Number, and it returns a hit in minutes.
John quickly receives a notification via email that his verification is complete and conveniently reviews the details within his LOS.
Read More: The New VOE/VOI Landscape: Compliance, Turn Times, & a Shift Toward Real-Time Data
How to Use Cascade VOE
Adopting a new technology, even when it offers impressive benefits, may sound like a lot of work. Luckily, this isn’t the case with Cascade VOE. This solution works with your existing workflows, rather than the other way around.
Since Cascade VOE integrates seamlessly with your LOS, all of your VOE data will automatically populate into a system you already know and use daily. As a result, you’ll enjoy access to all of your borrowers’ information in one place.
Not only is Cascade VOE easy to integrate with your current systems, but it’s also easy to use. All you have to do is:
- Set your vendor preferences
- Order your verification of income and employment
- Push submit
- Let Cascade VOE take care of the rest
It’s that easy!
Automate Your VOE Strategy With Certified Credit
As you can see, Cascade VOE has the potential to transform your VOE process. In addition to Cascade VOE, we offer a variety of other automated products and services.
Our growing suite of mortgage lending solutions includes:
- Customizable credit reports
- Credit score improvement tools
- Automated credit supplements
- Automated prequalification
- Automated undisclosed debt monitoring
- Flood zone determinations
- Property and valuation tools
- Fraud and risk support
- Settlement services
Are you ready to experience the benefits of automated VOE? Schedule a Cascade VOE demo with us today!
You can also learn more about the rest of our Cascade automated solutions here.
FAQs About Automating Your VOE Strategy
What is verification of income and employment (VOE), and why is it required?
VOE is the process lenders use to confirm that a borrower earns enough income and holds stable employment to repay their mortgage. It became a legal requirement after the 2008 housing crisis, when widespread approval of unverified stated-income loans contributed to mass defaults. Today, the Dodd-Frank Act requires lenders to make reasonable efforts to verify borrower income and employment before approving a loan.
What is the difference between traditional and automated VOE?
Traditional VOE methods, such as contacting employers directly, collecting borrower documents, or querying third-party databases one at a time, are time-consuming, error-prone, and more vulnerable to fraud. Automated VOE, like Cascade VOE, cycles through multiple vendors in a single workflow, reducing manual effort, increasing hit rates, and delivering faster results.
What is Cascade VOE and how does it work?
Cascade VOE is an automated verification tool from Certified Credit that requests income and employment verifications from multiple vendors in a customized sequence. Lenders choose their preferred vendors, set the order, and submit the request. Cascade VOE moves through the list automatically until it returns a hit, then sends an alert via email, SMS, or directly within your loan origination system.
What is Income Qualify and how is it different from a standard VOE?
Income Qualify is a prequalification-stage tool powered by Equifax and The Work Number. Unlike a standard VOE, which is ordered during underwriting, Income Qualify runs before a loan worksheet is ever built. It returns name and SSN verification, employer name, tenure, and prior year total income, giving lenders the directional confidence they need to decide whether a deal is worth pursuing before committing time or money to the full verification process. It is free for existing Work Number users and takes minutes to enable.
What is the Work Number Report Indicator?
The Work Number Report Indicator is an Equifax tool delivered alongside the Equifax Mortgage Prequalification Credit Report. It provides a simple yes or no flag indicating whether a standard VOIE record exists for a borrower in The Work Number database. This upfront signal helps lenders avoid ordering reports that will not return results, segment borrowers more efficiently, and better predict their cost to close.
What hit rate can I expect with Cascade VOE?
Hit rates vary depending on the vendors in your cascade, but on average, Cascade VOE clients see hit rate increases of 20% to 30% within the first year. If no vendor in your cascade can verify a borrower, Cascade VOE automatically routes the request to Certified Credit’s manual VOE team, with most verifications returned within 48 to 72 hours.
Does Cascade VOE work with my existing loan origination system?
Yes. Cascade VOE integrates directly with your LOS, so verification data populates automatically into the system you already use. You do not need to log into separate vendor systems or manage multiple portals. All of your borrower verification data is accessible in one place.
Sources:
[i] Motley Fool. Stated Income Loans Wrecked the Housing Market in 2008. Here’s Why They’re Safe in 2021.
[ii] Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Issues Rule to Protect Consumers from Irresponsible Mortgage Lending.
[iii] Investopedia. Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dodd-frank-financial-regulatory-reform-bill.asp
HousingWire. Fannie Mae warns lenders: There is a growing list of fake employers showing up on mortgages.
Forbes. Data Privacy Tops Concerns For Americans – Who Is Responsible For Better Data Protections?
Equifax. Verify Employment Application Data Fast.
https://theworknumber.com/solutions/industries/pre-employment-verification
[iv] Fannie Mae. Day 1 Certainty.
https://singlefamily.fanniemae.com/applications-technology/day-1-certainty
