Coop - How to tell if an applicant is lying?

Hi all, I'm on a coop board and we're pretty easy on our incoming shareholders, but we are income restricted. We got an application today that was blatantly false. The applicant applied as a sole owner of the apartment, listed their salary as within the income guidelines, but their tax returns showed that they are married filing jointly, and well outside of the income restrictions given the... [more]

Hi all, I'm on a coop board and we're pretty easy on our incoming shareholders, but we are income restricted. We got an application today that was blatantly false. The applicant applied as a sole owner of the apartment, listed their salary as within the income guidelines, but their tax returns showed that they are married filing jointly, and well outside of the income restrictions given the spouse's income. We have a restriction that the incoming shareholder must be within the income restriction for the last 2 years, so this person doesn't qualify. My question is this: how do board members determine if an application is being falsified? This person is just a lazy applicant, but what do you do if a married person applies for ownership of the apartment, but doesn't list their spouse, or isn't filing jointly? Because of our income restriction we try to be very careful about ruling out buyers that are trying to game the system, but in our experience it's hard to tell without doing some kind of background check. We tend to just err on the side of "if it smells fishy, it's a pass", but there's got to be tips or tricks. Any board members have experience in this realm? Thanks! [less]