A pay stub carries enough information to check itself: the pay rate, the pay period, the number of pay periods elapsed in the year, and the year-to-date totals. Multiplying the stated rate by the pay frequency and the number of periods elapsed should land reasonably close to the year-to-date figure shown — not exactly, since overtime, bonuses and deductions introduce normal variance, but close enough that a wildly inconsistent result is worth asking about. This single check, done consistently on every file rather than only when something already feels wrong, catches a meaningful share of altered pay stubs before they go any further.
It also catches innocent errors — a stub genuinely can be inconsistent because of a mid-year raise, a leave of absence, or a payroll system quirk. The point of the check isn't to assume the worst result means fraud; it's to know when to ask a specific, answerable question rather than let an inconsistency pass unexamined.
A pay stub alone is a self-reported document, however official it looks. Wherever possible, corroborate it against something the borrower didn't produce themselves: a Notice of Assessment, a T4, direct confirmation from the employer through an independently sourced contact, or a lender's own income-verification service where one is available. Consistency across two independently-sourced documents is worth far more than either document looking clean on its own.
This matters even more for a first pay stub from a very recent job, exactly the situation covered in this course's companion module on new-to-Canada files — a single stub with no prior history to compare against benefits enormously from any independent confirmation you can get, precisely because there's less of a track record to lean on otherwise.
A bank statement should be internally consistent — the account number and institution shown on the statement itself should match what the borrower has provided elsewhere, and the format should be consistent with what that specific institution actually issues, which is one more reason a genuine relationship with a client's actual bank branch, when possible, is worth more than a document alone. Watch for transaction histories with visible formatting breaks partway through, balances that don't carry forward correctly from one page to the next, or an institution name that doesn't correspond to any bank or credit union actually operating in Canada.
A large deposit landing shortly before a down-payment verification period, with no clear or consistent explanation, is one of the most common patterns worth a direct, specific question — not because a large deposit is inherently suspicious, but because down-payment source-of-funds rules exist precisely to establish where money legitimately came from, and an unexplained lump sum undermines that regardless of whether anything else in the file is wrong.
Sometimes a client offers an explanation for an inconsistency that sounds plausible on the surface but doesn't actually match the documents once you check it against them — a claimed gift that doesn't match the timing or amount of the deposit, a bonus that doesn't appear anywhere else in the employment documentation. Treat a mismatched explanation the same way you'd treat the original inconsistency: something to verify further, not something to accept simply because an explanation was offered at all.
An explanation is a starting point for verification, not a substitute for it.
A borrower's pay stub shows a year-to-date income figure roughly 40% higher than what the stated pay rate and pay frequency would produce over the same period, with no bonus or overtime noted elsewhere in the file. What is the right next step?
A 40% gap with no explanation anywhere else in the file is well beyond ordinary payroll variance, and the correct response is to ask and independently verify, not to accept it, silently paper over it with your own adjusted number, or pass the problem downstream unaddressed. Quietly changing the number yourself is arguably worse than doing nothing, since it obscures the discrepancy rather than resolving it, and passing an unexamined red flag to the lender doesn't discharge your own responsibility to have looked at it first.
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