A bank statement has running math you can recompute. A pay stub has gross-to-net arithmetic and year-to-date totals that either reconcile or do not. An employment verification letter has neither. It is usually a short block of prose on a letterhead, asserting a job title, a start date, and a salary, signed by someone whose signature you have never seen.
There is very little inside an employment letter that can be checked against itself. The verification has to come from outside the document.
That is the whole shape of this guide. The document review below is worth doing, and it will surface the careless cases. But it cannot establish that a letter is genuine, and treating a clean-looking letter as confirmation is the most common mistake in this workflow. The section on contacting the employer is the one that actually decides the question.
1. Start by deciding what the letter needs to prove
Letters get requested for different reasons and the standard should follow the decision. A landlord confirming that an applicant can carry the rent needs current employment and current income. A lender may need employment stability, income composition, and continuance. If the letter does not speak to the thing your decision turns on, its authenticity is not the first problem.
- Confirm the letter states current employment status, not a past role.
- Check that the income figure is a rate and a period, not an unlabeled number.
- Note whether variable pay is described as guaranteed, historical, or projected.
- Confirm the letter is dated recently enough to be meaningful for your decision.
2. Read the letter against what a real one usually contains
Formats vary widely between employers, so no single template is authoritative and a missing element is not an accusation. Still, letters produced by an HR department or a payroll platform commonly carry most of the following, and a letter missing several of them typically warrants a source check before it carries weight.
- Company letterhead with a physical address and a main phone number.
- The date the letter was issued, and often the name of the requesting party.
- Employee full name, job title, and employment status such as full time or part time.
- A start date, and for former employees an end date.
- Compensation stated with a period attached, such as annual salary or hourly rate with typical hours.
- A named signer with a title, a direct phone number, and a company email address.
- Language limiting the letter to what the employer is willing to confirm.
Two patterns are worth noticing rather than acting on. Letters that read as persuasive rather than factual, praising the employee or vouching for their ability to afford something, are unusual because employers generally avoid statements that create liability. And letters with unusually specific reassurance, such as volunteering that employment is guaranteed to continue, run against the at-will language most HR departments prefer. Neither observation proves anything. Both are reasons to verify at the source.
3. Check the contact details independently
This is the step that catches the largest share of problems, and it costs a few minutes. The failure mode it prevents is simple: calling the number printed on the letter and reaching whoever produced the letter.
- Find the employer through a source you located yourself, not through the letter.
- Compare the letterhead address and main phone number against that independent source.
- Check that the signer’s email domain matches the company’s real domain, and look closely at near-miss spellings.
- Treat a free webmail address on an employer letter as a reason to verify by phone, not as proof of anything.
- Confirm the company exists as described, including its registration where that is a matter of public record.
Where the employer is small, or is a staffing agency, or the applicant is a contractor rather than an employee, expect legitimate irregularity. Small businesses often have no HR function and no letterhead, and the owner signs their own letters from a phone number that also rings at their desk. That is normal. It simply means the letter is worth less as independent evidence, and the verification has to lean harder on other documents.
4. Inspect the file, with realistic expectations
If you received a PDF rather than a scan or a photo, the file itself carries a little context. It rarely settles the question, and it is easy to over-read.
A PDF may identify the software that produced it, along with creation and modification timestamps, incremental revision pointers, embedded scripts or attachments, and any signature container. Compare those facts with the claimed workflow. A letter that an HR system generated and a letter that someone typed in a word processor look different at this level, but plenty of legitimate letters are typed in a word processor, and plenty are printed, signed, and rescanned in a way that discards the useful structure entirely.
Several of these checks are mechanical, and mechanical work belongs to software. Ocolta’s free PDF tamper checker runs entirely in your browser, so the file never leaves your device, and it reports only what it can actually observe: whether the declared file type matches its binary signature, which software the PDF says created and produced it, creation and modification timestamps, incremental revision pointers, embedded scripts or attachments, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the exact file you reviewed. It explains benign causes to consider for each observation, and it never claims a document is authentic or fraudulent.
A cleanly generated PDF is not proof that the letter is genuine. A modified PDF is not proof that it is not.
5. Cross-check the letter against the other documents
A letter is most useful when it is not the only thing you have. Inconsistency between documents is more informative than anything inside any one of them.
- Does the stated salary reconcile with the year-to-date figures on the pay stubs? See the paystub verification checklist for the arithmetic.
- Does the employer name on the letter match the payer name on the stubs and the deposit description on the bank statements?
- Do the deposit amounts and their cadence match the pay period the letter implies?
- Does the start date fit the year-to-date totals, or would it imply earnings the stub does not show?
- Does the job title on the letter match what other records suggest?
Expect ordinary explanations for small mismatches. Payroll is often run by a service whose name appears on the deposit rather than the employer’s. A salary can change mid-year. Bonuses and commissions distort year-to-date math. Document the mismatch and ask about it rather than scoring it.
6. Verify with the employer, carefully
Source verification is the step that produces an answer. It is also the step with the most rules around it, and the details vary by what you are underwriting and where you operate.
In general terms: contact the employer through the number or address you found independently, ask for the department that handles verifications, and confirm only the facts you need for the decision. Many larger employers route verifications through a third-party service rather than answering directly, and many will confirm dates and title while declining to confirm compensation, which is a policy choice rather than a red flag. Some employers require the employee’s written authorization before they will confirm anything, so having a signed release from the applicant in hand before you call saves a second call.
- Use contact details you sourced yourself.
- Have the applicant’s written authorization ready where it is required.
- Ask only what your decision requires.
- Record who you spoke with, the number you called, the date, and what was confirmed.
- Accept a partial confirmation as partial, and note what remains unverified.
Where an employer will not confirm compensation, the practical fallback is to lean on documents that carry their own internal math, or on a verification service the employer already uses. That is a weaker result than a direct confirmation, and it should be recorded as such.
7. Write down what you could not determine
The output of this process is not a verdict. It is a record: what you observed, what you confirmed at the source, what you could not confirm, and what you decided on that basis. That record is what makes a decision explainable later, and it is the reason to keep “unable to determine” as a real outcome rather than rounding it to approval or denial.
If the review does turn up a genuine inconsistency, resist the urge to confront it as an accusation. People submit wrong documents for boring reasons, including sending an old letter, or having a family member prepare paperwork on their behalf. Ask a specific, factual question about the specific discrepancy and see what comes back.
What this review cannot establish
Reviewing the letter cannot tell you that the person still works there today, because a letter is a statement about a moment. It cannot tell you that the income will continue. It cannot detect a letter written by someone with real access to company letterhead. And it cannot distinguish a carefully produced document from a genuine one on appearance alone, which is the reason step six exists and the reason it is not optional when the decision is significant.
Adverse decisions based on information you obtained about an applicant carry notice and process obligations in many contexts, including tenant screening and lending, and those rules differ by jurisdiction and by the kind of decision. This guide is about establishing the facts. What you are required to do once you have them is a question for your own counsel and your written policy.