Bankers, lenders and others who do business with service members must frequently do military status checks to stay in compliance with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act.
The SCRA is a federal law that provides certain protections to active duty military members. These include, for example, protections from eviction, foreclosure, and repossession without a court order. The SCRA also mandates an interest rate on loans of no higher than 6% for members of the military.
You may expect that your clients will inform you of their military status, but you can’t trust that they always will, or even can. Deployments and call-ups can often come at the last minute. And this is what the SCRA was designed for in part — relieving military personnel of concerns such as calling their credit card company or mortgage loan holder when they should instead be focusing on their job of protecting and defending our country.
That’s why smart leaders, bankers, property managers and other people doing business with members of the military check their clients’ active duty status frequently, to verify whether it has changed recently. A civilian client may have joined the military, or a reservist may have been called to active duty.
If you don’t know which clients are in the military, you don’t know who’s entitled to the protections. And if you don’t extend the proper protections, you may find yourself in violation of the SCRA. The U.S. government — the Department of Justice in particular — can and does levy fines and penalties in the millions of dollars on violators, and jail time is also a possibility. These actions can be devastating to a business. Preventing this from happening by performing frequent military duty status checks is the best, cheapest way to stay in compliance with the SCRA.
While is it possible to perform these military service checks on your own, it isn’t always easy, especially when you have to perform a multiple record search for several or even hundreds of clients every month. And it takes time. When you have an eviction, repossession or another court action to deal with, more time lost is more money lost.
Many bankers, lenders, property managers, and others rely on the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act Centralized Verification Service to perform these active duty status checks for them. We perform these services quickly — usually within 24 hours — and the results are delivered right to your inbox (encrypted, for security reasons). We offer our services at a reasonable rate; plus, we offer batch discounts for multiple record searches.
It’s easier to get results for a military service record request quickly when we have the clients’ Social Security numbers, but we can often verify military status without this information, as long as we have some other important identifiers such as full name, address, telephone number, license plate tag number, names of relatives, etc. If this information doesn’t turn out to be enough to allow us to verify your clients’ military service, we’ll give you a full refund.
Save yourself time, money and headaches: Rely on SCRACVS for all your military service checks. Our services provide value and security, and you can trust the results. Contact us today and learn how we can save your business money, and make your life easier at the same time.