Pay stub generators are a search away and cost about ten dollars, which is why fake stubs turn up in loan files, rental applications and onboarding packets more than any other document. They are convincing to look at and brittle under arithmetic — the deductions rarely survive being added up.
A fake stub is usually one of three things: a real stub with the numbers changed, a template filled in on a generator site, or an employer that does not exist. Each fails a different check.
The first two are pure arithmetic and need nothing but a calculator. They catch the majority of generated stubs on their own.
Subtract every listed deduction from gross pay and check the result equals the net figure shown. Generator sites often populate plausible-looking deduction lines without making them reconcile, and someone editing a real stub raises gross without touching the deductions. Either way the difference shows up immediately.
YTD figures have to be consistent with the calendar. Divide YTD gross by the number of pay periods elapsed in the year and compare against this period's gross — they should be close for a salaried employee. A YTD column that implies a different salary from the one on the same page is the second-most-common failure after gross-to-net.
Check the employer name, address and registration against public records — a fake stub often names a real-sounding company with no registration and no footprint. Docurensic's company analyzer reconciles the name, domain, phone line type and address against independent sources and reports what it could and could not verify.
Payroll systems emit stubs with consistent metadata and no edit history. A stub whose producer names a PDF editor, or that carries appended revisions, was modified after issue — and if a previous revision survives inside the file, the original figures can usually be recovered and compared directly.
A constructed example — not a real customer file — showing the kind of finding Docurensic surfaces.
The listed deductions total $1,489.45. Gross minus deductions is $5,910.55, not the $3,910.55 shown as net — a $2,000 discrepancy consistent with gross being raised after the fact.
Validation · arithmetic · definitiveYTD gross across 11 periods implies $4,283 per period, not $7,400.
Validation · cross-field · strongPay stub generators sell realism, and they deliver it: correct layout, correct terminology, a plausible tax line, a logo if you pay extra. What they do not sell is internal consistency, because no one checks it. The document is built to survive a glance from a leasing agent or a loan processor with forty files to clear.
That is the gap. A stub is a small closed system of numbers that must agree with each other and with the calendar, and a generated one almost never does. Docurensic parses the figures, reconciles them, checks the file for edit traces, and corroborates the employer against independent records — then reports which specific line failed, not just a score.
Five layers, one verdict. Every document runs through security, forensics, reasoning, validation, and external lookups — see how the engine works.
Add the deductions up. Subtract them from gross and check the result against the net figure printed on the stub. Generated stubs and edited ones both tend to break this, because changing one number without recomputing the rest is the whole point of the shortcut.
On their own, no — plenty of legitimate salaries are round. It matters in combination: a gross of exactly $7,400.00 with no cent values anywhere, deductions at suspiciously tidy rates, and a YTD column that does not divide cleanly is a pattern, and the pattern is what counts rather than any single tidy figure.
Yes. Alongside the forensic analysis of the file, the company analyzer reconciles the employer's name, domain, address, phone line type and public footprint against independent sources, and states plainly which facts it verified and which it could not.
The forensic checks — fonts, metadata, revision history, origin — are format-level and apply to any PDF payslip. The arithmetic checks apply anywhere gross, deductions and net appear on the same document, which is nearly universal, though local tax-rate expectations vary.
Other document types
Bank statements · Invoices · Utility bills · All document fraud detection
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