Deceased borrowers
Death records are checked monthly through Baselayer's Death Master File search, with a pending result treated as pending rather than as failure — and a no-hit never treated as proof that someone is alive.
Collections activity against a deceased borrower is one of the few servicing failures that is simultaneously a compliance breach, a reputational event, and a cruelty. It is also easy to commit: the person who would have told the servicer is the person who died, and an estate may take months to make contact.
Monthly mortality screening exists so that the platform learns from the record rather than from a distressed family member.
- Search submittedthe full number is fetched at the moment the request goes out and dropped straight afterwardsautomatic
- Pendingaccepted but not completed — not an error, and not a reason to try againwaits
- That search polledby the reference the provider returned, and polling never spends the attempt budgetautomatic
- Completedthe result is recorded with its own coverage scope on its faceautomatic
Where the records come from
Once a month, on the first, the platform checks borrowers against the federal Death Master File through Baselayer. The search works in two steps, which matters more than it sounds.
Like military service verification, it needs the borrower’s full Social Security number, fetched from your identity system — never stored here, and never in a log file or an error message.
Pending is not failure
The two-call shape matters because handling it naively is expensive and wrong.
Two rules protect against the same failure from opposite directions:
- A provider that accepts a search without returning a reference is a bad response, not a retryable one. The next action is to reconcile with the provider — because the search may well have been performed and billed, and the reference to collect it has been lost.
- A timeout resolves to unknown outcome, which is explicitly not retryable. When it is genuinely unknown whether a paid search ran, buying a second one is the wrong answer.
The rule underneath both: never submit another paid search merely because completion is taking longer than expected.
Precision is preserved
Death records do not always carry a full date. A source that supplies only a month, or only a year, is recorded as having supplied only a month or only a year — the stored precision is one of day, month, year, or unknown.
Widening a month-only record into a specific day would manufacture a fact nobody asserted, and every downstream decision that depends on the date of death — which payments were authorized, which contacts were lawful, when an estate obligation began — would inherit an invented precision. A partial date stays partial all the way through.
A no-hit proves nothing
Death Master File coverage is not complete and never has been, so the platform draws the only sound conclusion available:
A negative result is the absence of a record, not evidence that a person is alive. It updates freshness. It does not create a case, does not clear a prior fact, and does not release a protection that a different source established.
From signal to estate handling
A match opens a deceased-borrower case at high priority into the estate-handling queue — a queue restricted to workers registered for these task types and permitted to read the evidence, because a death notice is not general operational reading.
At intake, before review, the case pauses all collections-purpose outreach across every channel and collections actions. This is the broadest of the pre-review protections, and deliberately so: the cost of pausing collections against someone who turns out to be alive is a delay, and the cost of the opposite error is a collections call to a grieving family.
No AI confirms a death. The platform’s AI workforce may summarize evidence and prepare a review, and the confirmation itself is reserved to a person with an evidence-backed decision. The same restriction applies to sanctions determinations and benefit eligibility — see how agents are governed.