E-Verify Facts

The number of employers using E-Verify voluntarily has grown from 1,533 employers in 2005 (when it was made available to employers nationwide to 85,816 employers representing more than 446,000 worksites by September 2008. On January 8, 2009, USCIS announced that more than 100,000 employers had signed up to use E-Verify.

• In FY 2007, a total of 3.27 million employment verification queries were run through EVerify. That number more than doubled to 6.6 million in FY 2008. More than two million queries were run in just the first quarter of 2009.
• By September of 2008, about 11 percent of all new hires nationwide were being verified through E-Verify. The Bush Executive Order requiring Federal contractors to use the program would raise that to about 20 percent of all new hires.
• Arizona and Mississippi require all employers to use E-Verify; Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Utah require certain employers (e.g., state contractors) to use E-Verify; Tennessee law encourages all employers to use E-Verify.
• Throughout this rapid growth in users, E-Verify has become more accurate, more user friendly, and faster. DHS has made significant improvements to the system by including additional information, such as the photos of work-authorized non-citizens.

How do employers like E-Verify?

A September 2007 evaluation of E-Verify by Westat reported that:

• 95.8 percent of employers surveyed agreed that using E-Verify was not too much of a burden on their staff.
• 90.6 percent of employers agreed that E-Verify is an effective tool for employment verification.

[Courtesy NumbersUSA.com]