The anatomy of a discrepancy, check by check

What this is, and what it is not

This piece does not contain a discrepancy rate. That is deliberate.

Published discrepancy percentages circulate widely in this industry and are almost never accompanied by the things that would make them meaningful: which checks were in the package, which sectors, how the employer's form was worded, and crucially, what the provider counted as a discrepancy. A provider that flags every name-spelling variation will report a rate several times higher than one that does not, and neither number tells you anything about candidate honesty.

What is worth writing down instead is the structure. The causes of a mismatch are stable, they are unevenly distributed across the checks, and knowing which cause you are probably looking at is the thing that actually helps somebody holding a flagged report. That is what follows. The practical handling sits in how to read a discrepancy; this is the underlying taxonomy.

Five causes

Every discrepancy we have ever had to explain to a client falls into one of these.

1. Recall

The candidate is describing their own life from memory, sometimes years later, on a form. Dates drift, titles get remembered as the one used rather than the one recorded, and a course gets described as what it prepared you for. This is the largest category and it is not dishonesty in any meaningful sense.

2. Convention

Two organisations record the same fact differently. A university calls a degree one thing and the market calls it another. An employer's payroll records a joining date and the candidate remembers their offer date. A name appears with an initial on one document and expanded on another. Nobody is wrong; the records simply use different conventions.

3. Administration

Somebody made an error, and usually not the candidate. Payroll kept contributing after an exit. A records office typed a year wrongly. An employer's HR system holds a designation that was never updated after a promotion. These are invisible to the candidate and they cannot fix them in advance.

4. Elicitation

The employer's own form caused it. This is the category people are most surprised by and it is entirely fixable, which is why it gets its own section below.

5. Misstatement

The candidate said something that is not true. This exists, it is what verification is for, and it is a minority of what gets flagged.

Check by check

Identity

Dominant cause: convention. Name variation across documents is the overwhelming majority of what gets flagged here, and it is a feature of Indian naming rather than a defect in the candidate. Expanded initials, surname ordering, state-to-state transliteration differences, married and maiden names, a father's name used as a surname on one record.

What is substantive: a document number that does not exist at the issuing authority, or one that resolves to a different person entirely. That has no innocent reading.

Reading rule: variation in how a name is written is not a finding. Variation in whose name it is, is.

Previous employment

Dominant cause: recall and administration, almost always on dates. This check produces the most flags of any because it has the most fields, the longest recall window and the most third parties.

What is substantive: an employer with no record of the person; a designation overstated by a level rather than a wording; an undeclared employment that appears in the EPFO record; a declared employment at a company that never existed.

Reading rule: weeks are recall, months are worth asking about, and "we have no record of this person" is a different category of finding entirely, once you have confirmed the request reached the right legal entity. A large group with fourteen registered entities can genuinely have no record at the entity you asked.

Education

Dominant cause: convention. Course title wording and year-of-completion against year-of-conferment together account for most of it.

What is substantive: an award the institution never made; a diploma presented as a degree; a qualification claimed at a higher level than granted.

Reading rule: before treating "no record" as fabrication, confirm the request went to the awarding university and not to an affiliated college. A college cannot confirm a degree it did not award, and its "no record" is not evidence. This single error accounts for a meaningful share of education flags that resolve to nothing.

Address

Dominant cause: recall and reality. People move, and the address on the form is frequently the one on their documents rather than the one they sleep at. For early-career and migrant workers the current address may be months old by the time the check runs.

What is substantive: the candidate is not known at any declared address, including the permanent one. A single unconfirmed current address is weak evidence of anything; every address failing is different.

Reading rule: mobility is not a finding. A candidate who has moved three times in four years is a candidate who moved three times in four years.

Court record

Dominant cause: name collision. Common name combinations return matters belonging to other people, and the work is in resolving whether the matter attaches to the candidate at all.

What is substantive: a matter that can be positively tied to the candidate through parentage, address or age. A same-name matter that cannot be tied or excluded is a genuinely different statement and should be reported as one.

Reading rule: a pending matter is an allegation, not a finding. Decide in advance which categories are material for which roles, as the court record guide sets out.

UAN and EPFO

Dominant cause: administration. Overlaps at notice periods, delayed exit processing, group-entity transfers. Gaps where an employer was below the EPF threshold.

What is substantive: a sustained overlap with an employer the candidate never declared, particularly a competitor. See moonlighting.

Reading rule: a gap in contributions is not a gap in employment. Informal and below-threshold work leaves no trace, and the absence of a record is not a record of absence.

Directorship and DIN

Dominant cause: nothing, mostly. This check either returns something or it does not, and the register is precise.

What is substantive: an undisclosed directorship in a competing or related business; a disqualification; a trail of struck-off companies; a resignation timed immediately before a company's problems became public.

Reading rule: a dormant directorship in a family company from eight years ago is not the same as an active one in a competitor. Read what the company does, not just that it exists.

Discrepancies your own form creates

This is the most useful section for anybody who runs verification at any volume, because these flags are free to eliminate and they consume a real share of everyone's time.

What the form asks	What it produces	Fix
"Employer name"	A brand name that maps to several legal entities, so the request reaches the wrong HR desk and returns no record	Ask for legal entity and work location, and employee code if held
"Employment dates"	Date mismatches on nearly every case, because candidates give offer dates and payroll holds joining dates	Say which you want, and accept a small tolerance without flagging
"College"	An education check sent to a body that cannot confirm the award	Ask for the awarding university or board as a separate field
"Designation"	Market-facing titles that do not match internal records	Ask for the title on record, and treat wording differences as detail
"Address"	Unreachable addresses and repeat visits	Require a landmark and a pin code, and ask separately for current and permanent
"Name"	Variation flags across every document	Ask for the name as it appears on each document, and expect them to differ

An employer who fixes those six fields will see their flag count fall without a single change in candidate behaviour, and their turnaround improve at the same time, because most of these flags were also delays.

The two findings with no innocent reading

After all of that, it is worth being direct about the small set that does not need weighing.

1. An employer with no record of the person, where the request has been confirmed as reaching the correct legal entity and the period is within their retention.
2. A qualification the awarding institution states it never granted, where the request went to the awarding body rather than an affiliated college.

Both are claims that do not exist rather than claims recorded differently. Everything else on this page is a judgement about a role, and judgements are better made against a written policy than against a joining date.

What this means for how a report should be built

If the analysis above is right, then a report that reduces a case to a score or a colour is destroying exactly the information a reader needs. The distinction between "payroll kept contributing for a month after exit" and "two employers concurrently for two years" is the entire decision, and both are an amber chip.

That is why GVS annexes the source response to every finding and states both versions of a disputed fact rather than resolving it. Not as a service feature, but because the alternative asks a hiring manager to make a decision on a colour.