Beyond the Background Check: Introducing Identity Integrity

Every fraudulent employee we’ve ever found passed a background check. Many made it through identity verification too.

That’s not a flaw in background checks or identity verification. It’s a gap in what they were built to do. They confirm that a document is legitimate, that a record exists, or that a name matches a database. They don’t answer the harder question: does the person behind those documents hold up when you look at the whole picture?

That’s where identity corroboration comes in. Our new product, Identity Integrity, cross-references information across independent sources to surface inconsistencies and risk signals.

What is Identity Integrity?

Identity Integrity is an on-demand identity corroboration assessment, available now in the Ascend platform. It cross-references an individual’s provided information against multiple independent sources including breach data, investigation databases, official public records, and digital footprint analysis. The question it answers isn’t “is this document real.” It’s “is this person consistent, traceable, and real.”

A few design choices are worth calling out, because they shape how the product fits into your existing process rather than disrupting it.

Nothing is required from the individual.

No selfie, no document upload, no extra step in the candidate or employee experience. Your team runs the assessment using information you already have: resume, LinkedIn, work history, and other details already sitting in your ATS or HRIS.

It surfaces risk. It doesn’t make decisions.

Identity Integrity produces a report with the overall discrepancy level, the specific signals behind it, and the underlying evidence. It does not recommend hire or don’t-hire, and it does not make employment or access decisions.

Identity Integrity is not a background check and not a consumer report, and it doesn’t replace either. It’s a different layer, looking at whether an identity holds together, not whether a document is authentic.

It’s built for volume, not just your highest-risk roles.

It’s priced for scale and API-enabled, so it integrates into your ATS, HRIS, or security workflows and supports bulk screening across large populations. Reports come back in minutes.

Where identity corroboration fits across the workforce

Pre-hire.

This is the most immediate application: corroborate a candidate’s identity early, before you’ve invested in interviews and onboarding. Fraudulent candidates are getting good at what they do. They co-opt real identities, manufacture personas to go with them, and use AI tools to get through interviews and build resumes that clear the first screen. They can pass a document check. Identity Integrity looks at what a document check can’t see: whether the digital footprint behind the persona actually adds up. Given that replacing a bad hire can cost 50% to 200% of annual salary, the case for catching this early is straightforward.

Employee investigation.

Identity questions don’t stop at the hiring decision. When your own trusted workforce program or insider threat monitoring raises a flag, Identity Integrity gives you a rapid, one-off identity corroboration, a different lens than behavioral signals, on the same individual. It sits directly alongside the Ascend Insider Threat module, so security teams already running behavioral monitoring have a fast way to add identity context before deciding whether deeper investigation is warranted.

Identity assurance at scale.

This is where the stakes rise. If an organization discovers a DPRK-related infiltration, or any signal that points to broader exposure, Identity Integrity can run via API across sensitive roles or entire populations, surfacing inconsistencies that warrant review across hundreds of thousands of individuals if needed. This is also where a broader idea comes into focus: identity assurance is a foundational security capability, not a hiring formality. In a world of distributed workforces and remote hiring, the ability to corroborate identity across independent sources belongs in the same category as the other defenses an organization relies on. It’s fair to say Identity Integrity is the new firewall.

How independent sources reveal identity inconsistencies