In May I re-financed my home. About three days prior to the closing, my mortgage broker’s admin phoned me at work asking who might be available right then and there who could verify my employment on the phone. I transferred the call to my immediate superviser and a few minutes later he told me that although HR forbids him from verifying employment, he didn’t see any harm, so he did to help me out.
My broker sold my loan within days of the closing to Bank A. In the beginning of Aug, Bank A is in the process of selling my loan to Bank B. Simultaneously, Bank A audits my loan. Unbeknownst to me, they call my superviser, again, on Aug. 13 to re-verify employment.
Yesterday I get a phone call from someone in my comapny’s HR dept. In a very accusative and aggresive tone, she stated that Bank A had sent a letter to HR stating that they had spoken to my superviser on Aug. 13 to verify employment. HR lady asks me point blank if this is so. I responded that I did not know. She then stated that the letter from Bank A asks if the information my superviser conveyed in the phone call was true. HR lady concludes, however, that if there was no phone call, she would be forced to reply that the info was not true because there was no phone call. Then she asked me again if my superviser had spoken to my bank on Aug. 13. Undaunted, I replied that I did not know and realised I had a witch hunt on my hands. This went back and forth for about fifteen minutes until she asked me again for the fifth time whether my superviser had spoken to my bank on Aug 13 when I asked her if she realised that if she were to respond to the bank survey that the info was not factual, that that would imply I did not work for the company which in itself would be false. She did not see it that way. I told her I would be speaking to my mortgage broker and my lawyer. That pretty much ended the conversation.
I conveyed this info to my supervisor who indicated he had had a similar conversation earlier with the HR lady and had denied talking to my bank on Aug 13 even though he really doesn’t remember whether he did or not. (I wish he hadn’t told me that.)
As the VP of HR at a large and growing company, consider this My Advice to All From an HR Professional:
If anyone ever, no matter who, no matter when, calls YOU (which is stupid) to verify your employment, immediately send that call to your Human Resources Department.
Why?
Because verification of employment should only be done within certain guidelines. There are questions which the bank or broker or credit card company or auto finance company (or whomever) might ask which are not their business to know, and in fact, aren’t legal.
Your supervisor, as kind-hearted and polite as they may be, might give away data about you which is not his/hers to give.
HR knows what can and can’t be said, and can dispatch a simple employment verification in a heartbeat. No fuss, no muss, no headaches.
It’s what we do.
Now, with regard to the specific issue raised in the OP: your HR person is trying desperately to CHA in case your supervisor said something that he shouldn’t have said.
At this point, I’d suggest asking the bank to send a simple VoE request directly to your HR department, and telling them to fill it out and send it back, and screw who talked to whom when. It’s irrelevant, and if HR has any brains, they will show the date that your employment started, so the bank can’t try to trump up some charge that your employment data was, at some point, incorrect.
This doesn’t answer your question, but I would like to jump in and scoff at the stupidity of your lender’s representative calling and asking you whom they could speak with to verify your employment. At the mortgage company I work with we must independently obtain a contact through directory assistance or similar means or the employment verification is not valid. After all, you could pass the phone to your bestest pal in the world who could fudge your hire date or any other information. Dumbasses, I say.
** Lorenzo **, it seems that a specific authorization for release of information could have been executed by you to give your company express permission to release info. to your broker or other necessary parties.
I would have probably laughed at her and told her that if she lied about my employment status, I would be forced to take legal action. Since I have regular legal council, I would have reenforced the idea by giving my lawyer’s phone number.
It is unfortunate, but in our country those words are magic. No HR department would want to hear them.
In our state, a company must provide a way to verify employment. However, they DON’T have to verify it themselves. Our company uses a third party for this verification.
I would apologize to the ends of the earth and back. I wouldn’t want to risk a glitch in my refinancing because I was going to the mat with some rude freak from HR. I would tell her I was sorry for disrupting the HR system, and (most important) get the conversation back on track by asking what we could do from here to resolve the problem. I would also throw in “I don’t want to create more work for you, so let me know what I can do to straighten things out.” To avoid flaunting the fact that the supervisor knowingly broke the rules about verification, I would keep everything in terms of a vague misunderstanding … “gee, I thought the supervisor could verifiy on the phone, and then HR would confirm in writing …”
While you didn’t know about the 8/13 conversation specifically, you did know that your supervisor spoke to the bank at some point. I think the repeated “I don’t know” exchange is preventing you from getting the conversation back to a more productive place, namely, what has to happen next to confirm employment with the bank. I would offer to send her something in writing, a memo saying that the supervisor spoke to the bank, so that she has something on record, and have it signed by both you and your supervisor.
It sucks that she was so rude and abrasive on the phone, I know that’s very annoying, and personally, it makes my blood boil, and I don’t mean to dismiss that. I think though, that if this situation were happening to me, I would want to keep my eye on the prize – the refinancing.
Ok, I did call her a rude freak from HR up above, but I would try to give her every possible benefit of the doubt. Maybe her supervisor just tore her a new one at a staff meeting about the employment verification policy. Maybe your bank was bank #101 to call her that day about a misdirected verification. I would try to keep this in mind and respond how I would want someone to deal with me if they had done some screwy thing that was creating more work for me.
Yes, it’s ass-kissy, but one man’s ass kissing is another man’s (or woman’s) people skills.