A couple of days ago, the AJC published an article (linked below) documenting the standard criticisms of the E-Verify program (formerly known as Basic Pilot), which is the federal database system that can be queried by employers to determine whether or not their new hires are eligible to work in the United States. More and more states, counties and cities are enacting laws requiring employers to verify as a prerequisite to receiving or renewing a business license, or to receive public service contracts.

Currently, almost 60,000 businesses nationwide use the system with over a thousand signing up each week.

The author exhibits the anti-immigration enforcement bias often seen in articles about E-Verify. As the owner of a company that is an approved Designated Agent of the E-Verify program and someone who is very familiar with how the E-Verify system works (I use it every day), I could have easily taken the same facts expressed in this article and written a glowing report of E-Verify’s unqualified success.

I wanted to highlight some of the most glaring misrepresentations, beginning with the very first sentence which is unsupported by the remainder of the article:

Forcing U.S. companies to use a government system to verify the legal status of employees would result in hundreds of thousands of citizens and legal residents being initially rejected for work, critics said Tuesday.

More “the sky is falling” rhetoric:

“What they’re really putting at risk is all U.S. citizens,” said Angela Kelley, director of the Immigration Policy Center, in a conference call with reporters.

The critics’ contention is that the E-Verify program queries databases that are full of errors and were never designed to be an immigration enforcement tool. These errors, they say, would prevent “hundreds of thousands” of legal workers from finding employment.

In fact, there are several layers of safeguards built into the system to ensure that legal workers are not prevented from working. The most important safeguard is that the employer cannot query the E-Verify system until after the worker is hired. In other words, the system does not prevent anyone from receiving a job. Within three days, the employer must submit the employee’s name, Social Security number and other information from the I-9 form to the system.

If the information doesn’t match, the employee has an opportunity to correct the paperwork, often through a trip to the Social Security office. If the person can’t correct the discrepancy, the employer must fire the worker….

William Wright, a spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services, said that 92 percent of all queries are approved in less than five seconds. Of the remaining 8 percent, the vast majority are not contested, he said.

Wright said that employees are given a “due process for correcting data mismatches” and that there are many reasons why a person’s information would not match, such as a change in name or citizenship status….

“Less than 1 percent of new hires actually contest a mismatch,” he said. “Most mismatches that are not pursued involve the E-Verify system doing exactly what it is supposed to do: detecting and deterring unauthorized employment.”

In other words, the system returns an “Employment Authorized” response in 92% of all submissions. Of the eight percent that receive a “Tentative Non-Confirmation,” less than one percent of the employees challenge the system’s response. Stated another way, approximately 90% of those tentatively found to be ineligible to work AGREE with the system’s response and elect not to challenge it!

In the end, the critics’ call to scrap the E-Verify system is based on the possibility of error in less than one percent of the submissions to the system!

But even a small error rate could lead to major problems if the system is mandated nationwide, said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.

Harper, who sits on a committee that advises the Department of Homeland Security on privacy and data integrity issues, cited a 2006 report by the Social Security Administration’s inspector general that said that the error rate of the agency’s databases, which are used in the E-Verify system, is about 4 percent.

Nationwide, this would mean that 1 in 25 new hires would not receive an immediate legal match, or 11,000 people a day would have to get their papers fixed in order to work, Harper said. And many on the low end of the socio-economic scale would not be able to navigate that process, he added.

First and foremost, Harper’s estimation ignores reality. Review the actual numbers above: regardless of the estimation of the error rate in the SSA database, a non-confirmation (which is not necessarily an error) is returned in only eight percent of the submissions and fewer than one percent of the workers submitted to E-Verify contest the initial non-confirmation. It is pure speculation that 11,000 people a day would be inconvenienced by the system.

(The obvious problem with Harper’s estimation, of course, is that his “11 thousand a day” figure assumes that 100% of the estimated four percent of errors in the SSA database will be the subject of an E-Verify query. That is not supported by the facts or logic.)

You should also understand that the E-Verify system is not the final word on anybody’s work eligibility. If a “Tentative Non-Confirmation” is received electronically, the employee is given the opportunity to speak to a human being at the Social Security Administration or Department of Homeland Security. An SSA or DHS representative conducts a manual review of the employee’s record and can resolve problems for legal workers. Many times, the problem is as simple as the worker didn’t update her Social Security name info after a marriage.

Harper contends that many of his “11,000 people a day” would be unable (read “too stupid”) to know that they were eligible to work; too stupid to understand that they had a right to contest a Tentative Non-Confirmation; or too stupid (or too lazy) to make a trip to the local SSA office or pick up a phone to call the DHS (at a number provided by the employer, incidentally).

A study last year by a private firm contracted by Homeland Security showed that naturalized citizens are far more likely than U.S.-born citizens to be found not eligible to work.

About 10 percent of foreign-born U.S. citizens receive a “mismatch,” often because they have not updated their citizenship status with the Social Security Administration.

Again, remember to employ some common sense. It is understandable that naturalized citizens (immigrants who earned citizenship) might have a higher percentage of Tentative Non-Confirmations, given the fact that they have been the subject of greater paperwork requirements on their path to citizenship.

In addition, they have the responsibility by law to maintain the accuracy of their Social Security record, much like a woman who marries. It seems a bit disingenuous to criticize the SSA database (and, by extension, the E-Verify program) for inaccuracies when many of those result from the failure of the worker to maintain his/her own SSA record as required by law!

Besides concerns about mismatches, critics said that an expansion of E-Verify would hurt small businesses that don’t have the staff or technology to comply.

As I wrote earlier, I operate a company that provides verification services for employers. To hire us, you pay no setup fee, no monthly fee, and a small charge only when you submit an employee to the E-Verify system. The only “technology” that you need to comply is a fax machine… or an envelope and a postage stamp. Oh yeah… it isn’t required but it helps if you can send and receive email.

Participation in E-Verify requires employers to do little more than they are already required by law to do. Additional staff is not needed by most employers; verification requires less than five minutes of staff time (a little more if a Tentative Non-Confirmation is received).

“Some small businesses would be forced to close their doors,” said Jessica Johnson Bennett, government relations director at the Plumbing Heating Cooling Contractors Association.

This is just more intellectually dishonest exaggeration. If participation in E-Verify forces any small business to fail, it will be because it relied on illegal labor. And if that business does fail, the E-Verify system has done its job.

As more states and local governments move to adopt employment eligibility verification as a prerequisite for licensing or public contracts, the alarmist rhetoric from the anti-enforcement, pro-illegals crowd will grow louder and more strident. You should view anything you read with a critical eye, having educated yourself so that you can recognize when facts are being misrepresented and biases are being expressed.

Critics Bash Federal Employee Verification System | ajc.com