For professional employer organizations

Your Client Hires Them. You Carry the I-9.

ZipID adds verified identity to the Form I-9, built to run inside a PEO's onboarding or to be resold to clients as your own line. The person is confirmed, not just the paperwork.

Schedule a Demo Get the PEO I-9 Guide

No sales pressure. Pick a time that works for you.

I-9 audits ran roughly ten times 2024 volume last year. For a direct employer that is one workforce. For a PEO it is a book of business.
The ZipID bee examining an identity record with a magnifying glass beside a stack of employee files.
Under 8 minutes per I-9 No per-client monthly fee Volume-tiered partner pricing Remote and in-person, same workflow Designed to meet ICE audit standards

A Clean I-9 Is Not the Same as a Verified Hire

The form asks an employer to establish two things: that the documents appear genuine, and that they belong to the person presenting them. Most platforms handle the first. The second is where remote onboarding broke the process.

Your client

Interviews, hires, and directs the worker day to day. Often the only party who has seen them.

You, the PEO

Payroll, taxes, and onboarding run through your systems. One process, replicated across every client you serve.

The inspection

A Notice of Inspection allows about three business days to produce records. A process defect shows up as a pattern, not an error.

How I-9 responsibility is allocated between a PEO and its clients depends on your contracts and your operating model. That question belongs with your counsel. This page is about the operational side.

What Happens at the I-9

One workflow the new hire completes from any device, remote or in person, in under eight minutes. No authorized representative to find, no appointment to schedule.

1

Invite the new hire

Sent from the dashboard to any device. Nothing to install on their end.

2

Guided Section 1

OCR reads the ID and fills the form. Guided selection puts them on the right List A or List B and C documents instead of guessing.

3

Identity is verified

A live face match against the photo on the presented document, with liveness and synthetic image screening.

4

Scored, not judged

A biometric confidence score, visible in the dashboard before the hire reaches a client site.

What we do not claim

ZipID confirms that the person completing the form is the person pictured on the document they presented. It is not a document authentication service, and your compliance team will not hear otherwise from us. E-Verify integration is in progress and not yet certified. Ask on the call and you will get current status rather than a roadmap slide.

Two Ways to Partner

Most PEOs absorb I-9s as a cost of doing business. Partner pricing is per I-9 with margin built in, and there is no per-client monthly fee, which is usually what makes this arithmetic fail elsewhere.

Most partners start here

Wholesale

You bill the client. You keep the spread.

  • Tiered on your total annual I-9 volume across the book, not per client.
  • One platform fee at your level, never $89 a month multiplied by your client count.
  • Co-brandable to your clients.
  • Fold it into an onboarding fee or show it as a line item. Your call.
  • Available on the current product.

If you will not carry billing

Referral

You introduce. We contract and bill.

  • A recurring share on the revenue, no billing to administer.
  • No engineering work of any kind.
  • Right for compliance-led teams rather than revenue-led ones.
  • Smaller margin, and you give up the client relationship.
  • Available on the current product.

On pricing

Retail pricing is published at zipidapp.com/pricing, so you can work out what the partner spread is worth before you ever speak to us. Partner rates are set against committed annual volume and are not published, because a rate built for a 700-hire partner is the wrong number for a 40,000-hire one. Bring your worksite employee count and your turnover rate to the call and you will leave with a real figure.

Who is behind it

Two Companies, One Body of Work

ZipID was founded by Janice Kephart after 25 years in federal identity policy. She served as Border Counsel to the 9/11 Commission, drafted the federal identity theft criminal statute as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, authored the REAL ID Act, and architected the biometric border entry and exit mandate. She was Homeland Security Director at MorphoTrak and has testified before Congress 19 times.

That background is the reason ZipID exists in the shape it does. The I-9 has always required an employer to confirm identity, and the software industry that grew up around the form stopped at document review. ZipID was built to close that gap deliberately, not as a feature someone added later.

Why this matters to a partner

Identity Strategy Partners

Federal advisory practice, nearly ten years

Janice also owns Identity Strategy Partners, which has supplied senior engineering and policy support to the federal government for close to a decade.

For a PEO weighing a partnership, that answers a question you are probably not going to ask out loud. The identity expertise behind ZipID is not a startup bet on a new domain. It has been operating at the federal level, continuously, for ten years, and it is not going anywhere.

Questions PEOs Raise First

Our clients run their own HRIS. Does this create another system?
For the client, no. The new hire completes one workflow on their own device and the record lands in your dashboard. Where a client runs its own HRIS alongside your platform, surfacing I-9 status back into a single view is integration work we scope with you rather than quote from a template.
Does adding an identity check create a discrimination risk?
The workflow is identical for every new hire regardless of citizenship status, document type, or location. Uniformity is the design principle. A process that varies depending on who is standing in front of you is the one that creates exposure. Your counsel should review any change to your onboarding process, including this one.
We already run background checks. Is this duplicative?
No. A background check verifies records about a person. It does not confirm that the person completing the onboarding paperwork is that person. The I-9 is where the second question sits, and it is the one that usually goes unanswered.
What happens to the biometric data?
It is used to perform the match and governed by retention rules on our backend. It is not sold, monetized, or repurposed, and facial authentication is opt-in. Your security team can walk the full data flow, retention schedule, and controls with us before anything is signed.
How long does it take to stand up?
Wholesale and referral both work on the current product with no build on your side. Deeper integration, where I-9 and identity status surface inside your own platform, is a separate conversation, and we will tell you plainly where that work stands rather than put a date on this page.
Can we white label it?
Co-branding is available today. Full white label depends on integration work that is not finished, so we are not selling it yet. We would rather tell you that now than discover it together after a contract is signed.

Bring Your Clients an I-9 That Verifies the Human

A live walkthrough of the workflow and the dashboard, plus a partner rate quoted against your actual volume rather than a generic tier.

Schedule a Demo Get the PEO I-9 Guide

ZipID, Inc. | Alexandria, Virginia