Could you at least TRY to make it seem professional? Even then, I’m not sure how you’d expect to sneak a falsified paycheck past anyone…
I had an interesting issue pop up at work last week. This certainly wasn’t anything I’ve ever run into before in all the years I’ve been with the company.
I received a call from a financing company looking to verify employment on an individual. I didn’t recognize the name at all, so I called back and said they weren’t an employee. A couple days later I received another call stating that they would fax over a pay stub for this employee. Oh boy – this should be interesting! Now this I’ve seen before. Every single time it has another company’s name at the top of the check and I have to notify the sender that it doesn’t say our company’s name.
Lo and behold the fax DID have our company’s name. Wait a sec… I still don’t have any record of this person being an employee.
It only took a couple seconds before I realized the address and phone number sounded familiar. The department number was real, as well as the employee number.
Well what do we have here? A highly falsified paycheck!
I could not believe my eyes when I looked up the employee number. This check stub had REAL information on it! A real employee number, that employee’s department, their address and phone number (as the company address), and their pay information!
Well… sort of!
Upon closer inspection, it appears someone took a real pay stub and reconstructed it in Word – using their own name. What gave that part away was the HSA entry: the code said HAS. That drives me nuts when it auto-corrects like that!
Other oddities on the check stub included:
- Same voucher number on both stubs
- Same deductions on both stubs, but the total deduction amounts didn’t match
- Total tax withholding was listed on one stub, but the totals were missing from the other stub
- Amoount… really?? Amoount?
That left me shaking my head and wondering what kind of idiot would do this in the first place – and what kind of financing company would miss all the blatant inconsistencies on the documentation?!?
I simply sent a note back to the financing company stating “no record of this employee”. I then notified our employee whose information was stolen. Sad thing is: I think this person is someone close to them, known by them somehow.
That’s not a good person to have in your life. 🙁
Ohmigosh! People are so BOLD!!! I’m too chicken to be a crook I think. But I’d probably do a lot better job than these folks, yikes!
I’m still trying to figure out: at what point do you stop and think “hey, maybe these people are actually going to contact the company to verify this.” ????