RFI - Consent-Based Income Verification Solutions

Income verification is part of the application process for nearly all health and human service benefits programs. When an applicant’s income cannot be verified electronically, eligible people and case workers are left to do the onerous and time-consuming work of manual verification. Our interest is in expanding the ways that people can automatically verify their income, and one method we are exploring is consent-based or consumer-permissioned methods.

Based on research conducted to date, consent or consumer-permissioned methods represent software services that allow customers to access their own data from various payroll and financial institutions and give consent to share that data with another party for decision-making purposes. Workers who receive their income from non-traditional work arrangements (such as self-employment, gig and contingent work) represent an increasing size of the U.S. workforce. When applying for benefits, non-traditional work wages are not adequately represented in income verification data sources that primarily serve the W-2 workforce.