Thread: Unreliability of E-Verify?

Unreliability of E-Verify?
June 28, 2011
By Jack Martin, FAIR Special Projects Director

Critics of E-Verify are increasingly citing a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that said as many as half of illegal alien workers escape detection by the system. This they claim demonstrates that E-Verify is unreliable and should not be expanded as a requirement for all employers. That claim is hugely misleading.

The E-Verify system is nearly 100 percent accurate. 98.3 percent of employees are automatically confirmed as authorized to work either instantly or within 24 hours, requiring no employee or employer action. Of the other 1.7 percent who are not automatically confirmed, only a few (0.3%) are subsequently found to be authorized to work but first had to correct either the government's or the employer's records. The others did not contest the finding that they were not authorized to work. The half who supposedly are incorrectly found authorized, therefore, would represent less than 1.5 percent of the inquiries.

It is clear that some illegal alien workers escape detection by the E-Verify system, but no one knows how many. The false confirmation percentage cited in the GAO report was an estimate by a government contractor. Since that GAO report was issued, Richard Stana, the GAO director for homeland security and justice, reported to Congress in February 2011, "USCIS has reduced the incidence of ... E-Verify's vulnerability to fraud." And further progress in reducing false confirmations will be made when E-Verify is made a national mandatory system for all employers because the proposed legislation requires SSA to report evidence of false use of SSNs.

The irony in the claim of unreliability of the E-Verify system is that it is not being made as an argument for improving the system. It is cynically being made by defenders of illegal aliens in an effort to prevent E-Verify from being expanded nationwide. They are trying to preserve job opportunities for illegal workers.

steinreport(.)com

E-verify relies on the Social Security System and the DHS databases for immigration as well as a few other systems.

So it means these illegal aliens can also draw SS benefits, or SSI and gain other benefits, likely can vote and other illegal and fraudulent behavior.
The government needs to crack down on fraud in many of their systems, and E-verify can help with that as they improve it.

The GAO report also mentioned several ways to improve the accuracy which relies on Congress allowing more exchange of information and needs to be done to efficiently stop fraud within other systems such as IRS.

Of course,they wanna discredit e-verify! So they dont even have to enforce that!!

It is clear that some illegal alien workers escape detection by the E-Verify system, but no one knows how many.

And how many illegal invaders "escape detection" when E-Verify is not used?? They continue to discredit E-Verify, because it works a hell of alot better than the current system in place.

They are right, E-Verify is massively flawed. Yes almost 100% of legal workers are verified w/o any problems. However many many illegal aliens escape the system because they use a stolen full identity.

However rather then scrapping a program because of its flaw its better to fix that flaw especially when that fix is so very simple and only reason its not already fixed is groups fighting to allow the needed change.

Now what happens if we make one major change to E-Verify? That one major change is we count SSN's put through and compare it all to the SSA's database. Just link E-Verify to the SSA Database fully to crosscheck the same SSN that has multiple jobs at a time, multiple employers in very short periods, and so forth. Then we simply send out match letters and find the correct owner of said SSN and shut all others down.

This one single measure would bean E-Verify goes from being near 100% accurate at verifying legal workers to also being near 100% accurate at finding illegal workers.

Lastly shut down any SSN issued to a temporary worker/visitor after they leave and its at 99.999%

You don't scrap a system because of a purposefully made design flaw, you fix the flaw.