INCOME VERIFICATION
A pay stub is a claim. This is the record of what actually arrived.
That's what you see. Not a summary of it — the actual report.
Shows / Doesn't show
It's a document, and documents can be made to say anything. A number changed in an image editor used to be sloppy enough to catch — a misaligned font, a smudge, a shadow that didn't match. AI-generated paystubs don't make those mistakes anymore. The math is right. The formatting is right. There's often nothing left to spot.
And for freelance, gig, and contract work — DoorDash, Instacart, Upwork, self-employment — there was rarely a pay stub to begin with.
The current alternative is a signed release form and a phone call to HR. Then waiting. Then hoping someone picks up.
Before anything reaches you, the applicant reviews the same report you will. If a number looks off from what they remember, they can look closer before deciding anything — that closer look is theirs alone. What you receive is only what they've approved.
No account required for the applicant to receive it.
They authenticate directly with their bank through Plaid.
They see the report before you do, and decide.
Only what they've approved reaches you.
That's not a limitation of what's possible. It's a decision about what's necessary — and it's easier to show than to promise.
The retention above exists because we're bound to FCRA's rules, not because we chose to build a file on anyone.
There's no stub for what DoorDash, Instacart, or a freelance client paid last month. Under the old system, that income doesn't count until someone manually reconstructs it, gets waved through on trust, or the applicant is turned down for lack of paperwork that was never going to exist.
This doesn't ask an applicant to prove their income fits a format built for salaried employees. It verifies the income itself, rather than requiring it to arrive in a particular shape.
Gig, freelance, and contract income deserve the same fair look as a salaried paycheck — not a higher bar of proof because the paperwork doesn't look familiar. Looking at what actually came in, instead of demanding proof that was never going to exist, is what fair verification looks like.
That's the same respect that puts the applicant in control of what gets sent in the first place — verification that treats the person on the other end as someone to be fair to, not someone to catch out.
Plaid Check is Plaid's FCRA-compliant consumer reporting agency. This is built on that infrastructure, not a private substitute for it.
Plaid Check's architecture generates a broader report than we use. We only retrieve the income data described above — nothing else Plaid Check is capable of producing ever reaches us.