Complete Income: A New Solution from Equifax to Help Make the Benefits Determination Process Easier
APPLYING FOR, AND PROCESSING, SOCIAL SERVICE BENEFITS LIKE MEDICAID OR SNAP can be a stressful, paperwork-heavy process. A new Equifax solution, Complete Income™ for Social Services, is designed to help make this process faster, more insightful, and more efficient for everyone involved.
Now that the U.S. workforce has grown more complex, with the addition of nearly 35 million independent workers over the past four years, income for applicants who are gig workers, freelancers, or small business owners can often be difficult to verify.
“A top challenge for agencies in gig income verification is the difficulty of verifying self-employment income and its associated expenses from multiple platforms or jobs,” said Juan Cole, Vice President, Government Strategy and Solutions Consulting at Equifax. “We are helping them solve this problem with Complete Income, a comprehensive, efficient, and secure solution that can provide a more holistic view of an individual's income and expenses, enabling agencies to make better-informed eligibility determinations and more efficiently serve vulnerable populations.”
Traditionally, a caseworker is tasked with verifying an applicant’s income, sometimes relying on a manual, time-consuming process. For applicants with a traditional W2-issuing job, this can be fairly straightforward; but for gig workers or other types of self-employed individuals, the process often can be frustrating. The applicant may need to gather and deliver a stack of paperwork, including receipts, bank statements and expenses to the caseworker’s office. Then they must sort through the various documents, decide how to account for the various income and expense items, and enter the information. The result: inefficient processes, overburdened caseworkers, potential payment errors, and delayed benefits.
Powered by the Equifax Cloud™, Complete Income looks to further streamline the verification process by addressing the potential mountain of paperwork with a singular, digital workflow to benefit both the applicants and the caseworkers who serve them. The Equifax Cloud™ is a global technology and security infrastructure backed by an approximately $3 billion multi-year investment that has changed nearly every facet of the organization’s infrastructure.
Complete Income empowers social services agencies with a more comprehensive and efficient way to verify earned income, unearned income and self-employment business expenses for benefit program applicants. Purpose-built to help streamline the process for all involved, Complete Income uses:
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An instant Social Service Verification Report with the extensive, employer-provided income data from The Work Number®.
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Consumer-permissioned deposit income data (which may include 1099/gig, self-employment, and unearned income), offering connectivity to over covering 92% of U.S. financial institutions.
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The ability to manually enter additional self-reported income and business expenses.
This creates a more holistic and organized view of an applicant's income through a single workflow, helping with efficiency, and freeing up caseworkers to spend more time on the high-touch cases or people-facing parts of their job rather than sifting through receipts. In addition, this process results in a quicker path for eligible applicants to receive appropriate support, while also looking to reduce the risk of unintentional human errors that could affect benefit eligibility.
Complete Income is designed to make the benefit application process easier and more efficient, ultimately helping government agencies serve their constituents more effectively and with a better applicant experience greater confidence.