Updated 13 August 2026
The forged pay slip has become a staple of rental files and loan applications: an inflated salary on one's own slip, or a swapped name on somebody else's. Like every edit it leaves traces — and the French pay slip has one feature that makes it more verifiable than most documents.
Many French payroll systems print a 2D-Doc code on the slip: a small DataMatrix square, usually near the top or bottom of the page. It holds the key data — name, period, net amount — cryptographically signed by the issuer.
Its presence changes everything: if the salary printed on the page does not match the one encoded in the square, somebody edited the visual without being able to touch the code. It is one of the few checks close to proof. The details are in our 2D-Doc guide.
Its absence, on the other hand, proves nothing: not every employer uses software that generates one.
Pay slips come out of industrial payroll pipelines — Silae, PayFit, ADP, Sage, Cegid — whose technical fingerprint is very stable: same PDF producer, same embedded fonts, same structure month after month.
A slip whose metadata announces a word processor, an online converter or a screenshot tool contradicts what it claims to be. Employers do not type pay slips in Word.
A pay slip is a public addition. A forger who inflates the net pay almost always forgets to fix everything that depends on it:
As with proof of address, the common fraud does not build a slip from scratch: it swaps a name or an amount on a genuine one. The evidence therefore concentrates on those areas: a font change mid-line, a white rectangle covering the old value, a pasted image block whose resolution does not match the rest of the page.
A French pay slip must state the employer's company registration number (SIRET), activity code and collective agreement. All of it can be checked from outside:
A scanned or photographed slip keeps no text layer, no fonts, no payroll metadata. Most of the checks above become inapplicable, and the absence of anomalies then means nothing. When you are in a position to insist, ask for the original PDF — the one the employee downloads from the HR portal — rather than a flattened copy.
Edited amounts, altered dates, swapped bank details: the technical evidence that gives away a tampered invoice PDF, and how to check for it.
Utility, telecom and internet bills used as proof of address: the technical checks that reveal an edited document, and when the checks simply cannot apply.
A PDF keeps a record of its successive saves: incremental revisions, ghost objects, two sets of metadata. Where to look to find out whether a file was edited.
The 2D-Doc barcode on tax notices, pay slips and official certificates: what it contains, what it actually proves, and why it is different from every other check.
Payment redirection fraud swaps the bank details on a genuine invoice. IBAN checksum, bank-code consistency and PDF tampering traces: how to check details received by email.
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