Supporting the Social Safety Net with Data from The Work Number®

Government agencies charged with administering social service programs, such as SNAP, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, have the vital responsibility of ensuring eligible applicants receive timely assistance. The Work Number® from Equifax supports this mission by helping agencies promote efficient and effective eligibility decisions as caseworkers better manage workloads. Here's how it helps:

1. Accelerating Time-to-Benefit

The traditional, manual process of determining eligibility is often challenged by the volume of paperwork required to verify income and employment. Caseworkers must manage these manual processes at multiple points - from initial application to renewals - potentially creating frustrating delays for both staff and the eligible applicants in need of benefits. State agencies are also under pressure to perform ex parte renewals, a process where the government seeks a reliable, secure, electronic data source to help them automatically re-verify a person's eligibility for benefits without requiring any additional action on the part of the applicant.

The Work Number automates verifications by offering access to an industry-leading repository of income and employment data. This data is directly furnished to the database from more than 5 million contributing employers and payroll providers of all sizes and results can be returned to credentialed verifiers in real-time. This instantaneous access to data can help expedite the eligibility determination process so that eligible individuals receive appropriate benefits in a timely manner.

2. Enhancing Program Efficiency

The Work Number helps agencies replace slower, labor-intensive, manual verification processes with instantaneous, automated verification processes. An internal Equifax analysis indicates that, on average, government agencies see more than a 2:1 return on investment, with every dollar spent on The Work Number returning more than two dollars of productivity in caseworker time. This means caseworkers can spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focusing on the people they serve.

Automating processes can also be instrumental in helping prevent unintentional human errors during the determination and benefits lifecycle. Because data is furnished directly by employers and payroll providers, it often is more current than other potentially outdated government wage records or self-reported information. This is because The Work Number database is updated each time payroll gets processed by a contributing employer or payroll provider. Having access to more current information helps caseworkers make effective initial eligibility decisions, as well as during renewals, because they can more easily learn of potential job or income changes that impact eligibility or appropriate benefit levels.

In addition, to help agencies navigate the growing complexity of the modern workforce, solutions like Complete Income™ bring traditional W-2 data and consumer-permissioned gig economy or bank deposit data into a single workflow, effectively eliminating the administrative burden of manual reviews for applicants with multiple income streams.

These services offer access to data in real-time, which allows agencies to better streamline the redetermination process with no or minimal additional consumer interactions. This enables more seamless, automated renewals that keep otherwise eligible beneficiaries from losing appropriate coverage or benefits simply due to administrative churn.

3. Centralizing and Modernizing Workflow

The Work Number is designed to easily integrate with existing government processes and workflows. This provides streamlined access, offering credentialed government verifiers 24/7 access to data for employment and income verifications across a wide range of programs. Pairing this more comprehensive data with leading technology and decades of industry experience, Equifax can offer solutions tailored to help government clients more easily meet their determination process and policy needs.

By using The Work Number in their daily operations, government agencies can work to reduce the administrative burden on caseworkers and replace the slow, potentially error-prone, manual review of paper documents. Ultimately, this enhanced efficiency helps agencies meet their mission of delivering appropriate benefits to eligible applicants in their time of need.

Learn more about how The Work Number from Equifax leverages technology to support timely government benefits determinations.