Employment and Income Verification for Employers

Firstly, you must be opted into the Work Report™ service as an employer. This will typically be managed by your HR or payroll department. By opting into the service, you will be enabling your employees to access their payroll data via Work Report™.

Each time an employee initiates a credit application (e.g. credit card, mortgage etc.) they will need to consent to Work Report™ accessing their payroll data. Once they have consented, Work Report™ accesses their record from within your payroll/HR database. Work Report™ then passes the data to the Consumer Service Provider (e.g. a bank, that has been selected by your employee).

Some of your employees’ information such as their name and date of birth, along with a unique identifier, likely their National Insurance (NI) number, is submitted by the employee as part of an application (e.g. for a loan or mortgage) and is used, with their consent, to help Work Report™ locate their information in your payroll/HR database.

Work Report™ then accesses that specific employee’s income and/or employment data and shares it on a one-time basis with their chosen Consumer Service Provider (e.g. a bank). The data shared is specified by the Consumer Service Provider, selected by the employee. It is only ever the minimum amount required to process their application.

Yes. Data is typically shared using secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that connect directly to your payroll/HR database. Experian is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and is required to manage data under the governance of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) guidelines and best practice.

Employees only ever consent to share their data with a single Consumer Service provider (e.g. mortgage provider) of their choice, on a transaction-by-transaction basis.

Work Report™ is free to employees and employers. Consumer Service Providers such as banks pay Experian to use the service instead of requiring employees to submit payslips or get letters from HR.

Your employees’ PII and a Unique ID such as National Insurance (NI) number is captured in the verification process. This is used to authenticate your employee’s identity and to ensure that Work Report™ accurately matches the correct payroll data to that individual.

Work Report™ simply facilitates the transmission of the employees’ own data between their employer’s payroll or HR platform and the Consumer Service Provider of their choosing. Only the necessary income and/or employment fields that are required to inform the specific Consumer Service Provider use case are shared. This is in accordance with GDPR’s data minimisation principle.

Experian may hold the data for up to six years for audit purposes and for answering consumer enquiries only.

Work Report™ is consistent with the spirit and intention of GDPR, which supports consumer choice and control. An employer that has opted in to Work Report™, is not responsible or required to promote its use. By opting into Work Report™, you as an employer are simply enabling your employees to make the choice as to whether they would like to use Work Report™ as use of the service requires explicit employee consent every time it is used. 

If an employee leaves your company, they are no longer active on your employer payroll and so will no longer be able to share their payroll data from their ‘old’ employer. Experian may hold your employee’s data for up to six years for audit purposes and for answering consumer enquiries only.

A SAR should be submitted to the data controllers, which in this case is the Consumer Service Provider (e.g. the bank they have chosen to share their information with or Experian).