Treasury Check Verification System (TCVS) Replaces Treasury Check Verification Application (TCVA)
November 24, 2020
The Department of the Treasury, Bureau of the Fiscal Service (Fiscal Service), will retire the TCVA effective January 18, 2021.
All financial organizations that accept and negotiate U.S. Treasury checks are advised to transition to TCVS, which may be found at https://tcvs.fiscal.treasury.gov (Off-site). TCVS allows a financial organization to submit Treasury check information to Fiscal Service for the purpose of verifying that information, to assist the financial organization in its determination of whether to accept and negotiate the Treasury check.
TCVS provides this service through a website – similar to TCVA for single queries – and a more robust application programming interface (API), which enables automated bulk queries. The elements required to query the status of a Treasury check remain the same: Check Symbol, Serial Number, Dollar Amount, and Routing Transit Number of the financial institution conducting the query. Queries will return one of the following responses:
- Check Verified (true if the symbol, serial number, and amount are a match) or No Match (one of the elements are not a match or the check is expired)
- Status: Issued, Paid, or Cancelled. If the check is not a match, no additional status information is provided.
If there is no issue record in TCVS, it does not mean the check is invalid. Please note TCVS was created as a tool to assist in fraud detection; you still need to verify that the check possesses the security features of a Treasury check. Also, while not common, a Treasury check can be hand-signed, as opposed to signed by an automated process.
Participation in TCVS through the API may be requested using the form posted under Terms and Conditions (Off-site) on the TCVS website. Please note that security controls prevent screen scraping and scripts for high-volume queries on the website, so use of the API is highly recommended for organizations processing high volumes of Treasury checks.
TCVS is operational and currently used by many financial organizations. TCVS is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a short daily maintenance window between 6:00 a.m. EST and 6:30 a.m. EST.
Questions may be directed to Fiscal Service at paymentintegrity@fiscal.treasury.gov.