How we check income and assets without keeping the documents

Why we check at all

Men carry the cost of what happens here. If that premise turns out to be false, the cost moves to the other side of the table. You find that out at the meeting itself, and by then it is too late.

So we check before anyone goes on the list. Not by asking. By document.

What you create the moment you take a document

The easy way to check is to collect the paperwork and hold on to it. Have people upload a withholding tax statement or a certificate of income, have a reviewer look at it, switch on a badge, leave the file where it is.

Do that and the servers fill up with tens of thousands of images with a name and an income printed on them. That is not a feature. It is an asset. And this kind of asset is far easier to lose than to protect.

If we never ask, we can't check. If we store it, it leaks eventually. So we decided to take the document and keep nothing.

How it works

1. You upload the document.
2. A person looks at it on screen. Nothing is downloaded.
3. A decision is made.
4. The file is destroyed on the spot.

Destroying the file is not the last step. It happens before the decision is recorded. Build it the other way around and something can fail in between, and then you have a system that sometimes doesn't delete. Sometimes not deleting is the same as not deleting.

So if the file can't be destroyed, no decision is made. The worst outcome is a result on file with the document still sitting behind it, so we made that outcome impossible.

What we keep and what we don't

We keep	We don't keep
One band — one of three	The amount
Which year it covers	Your employer's name
Your legal name, to match the document against	Your address
	The document itself

There is no field for the amount. A reviewer can only pick a band. Build the field and one day the value gets stored, and once storing starts it is hard to undo.

Approved or not, it goes

There is no reason to hold on to a document we turned down. We are never going to look at it again, and keeping it makes it the same leakable asset.

Documents we haven't reached disappear on their own after 24 hours. Our backlog should not become your exposure.

Small income, real assets

Some business owners take the smallest salary they can. Some people have already stopped working and live on what they own. Make income the only condition and those people vanish from the list.

So you can verify with property or a car instead. For property we take a certified copy of the register or a property tax certificate. For a car, the vehicle registration or a lease agreement in your own name — enough people lease that the contract has to count.

Assets have no bands. There is one state, and it reads as assets verified. We could have written a formula turning assets into an income figure, but the conversion would be arbitrary, and mixing both into one scale makes neither worth believing.

The documents are handled exactly like income documents. Looked at, then destroyed.

Women are not asked for this

We don't collect it. They are not carrying the cost, so there is nothing to check, and personal data collected for no reason is the most dangerous kind there is.

Deciding not to collect something is also a feature.

Amounts don't appear on profiles

Only the band shows. Put an exact figure on a profile and that figure starts ranking people, and we would rather this not become that kind of place.

We show that the check happened. We don't show the number. We don't hold it either, so we couldn't show it if we wanted to.