If I receive a recommendation letter from someone at a company, do universities ever verify its authenticity directly with the company? In other words, do they check with HR or confirm whether I actually interned there, or do they usually rely on the recommender’s email address and the submitted letter as proof?
Funny. I’ve been a DGS. I’ve been on adcom for years. Sat in a million grad policy committee meetings over the years. And being in this sub always reminds me of the nuts and bolts issues I have no idea about. I have no idea whether that administrative office vets letters, but knowing something about the size of that office and the volume of materials they deal with, I’m going to guess they don’t.
We on the adcoms take wherever the administrators that collate and distribute the applications give to us, more or less at face value. Of course since we are evaluating, we generally have our fishyness detectors activated, so sometimes we will ask administration to verify something. We are also pretty confident that our last hurdle, the interviews, are pretty effective at weeding out fakers.
The potential penalties for a fraudulent application are also very high, and don’t have a statute of limitations.
They typically rely on the source, seal and signature, but they will absolutely verify LORs on admission if they are a highly ranked program. That said, I don't expect them to verify 100%, but a fake LOR can get you blacklisted, and universities share admission fraud data with each other when possible.