If It's Fixed, Don't Break It: Moving Forward with E-Verify


By Janice L. Kephart
September 2008
Backgrounders and Reports
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"I have been using E Verify for over three years. It takes away all of the guess work in determining if documents presented are valid or not. Being close to the border you would be surprised at the amount of fake IDs that look real until they are run through the program. For the first time in my 20-plus years in HR I am comfortable in knowing that we are hiring only employees who are authorized to work in the United States."
— Ginny Priborsky 1

The E-Verify program is well on its way to fixing a 20-year-old problem of determining legal employment eligibility in a manner employers can support. Arguably E-Verify is the most successful programmatic upgrade to U.S. interior border systems, assisting employers in abiding by the law and weeding out those that don't. Fast, efficient, and easy to use, E-Verify helps employers have confidence that their hiring choices are within the law and less likely to be disrupted by a worksite raid. Enabling employers to make better decisions about the legality of their hires also helps the federal government better prioritize enforcement tools. Illegal immigrants are dissuaded from applying for jobs that use E-Verify, thus making it less likely — the more prevalent in use E-Verify becomes — that illegals will settle into a job, only later to be arrested and land in deportation hearings that lead to family disruption while simultaneously draining enforcement and immigration court resources.

E-Verify enjoys broad bipartisan support, with reauthorization passing in the House of Representatives on July 31, 2008, by a vote of 407-2. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed a comprehensive immigration reform bill last year that reauthorized E-Verify, while in the Senate Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) made E-Verify a cornerstone provision in their comprehensive immigration reform bill. Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) also endorses E-Verify. 2 The entire federal government is using E-Verify. Eleven states require use of E-Verify in certain circumstances, including Arizona and Mississippi, which mandate use of E-Verify for all enterprises in the state. Only one state, Illinois, limits its use.

E-Verify will sunset on November 29, 2008, if not reauthorized. 3 It may not be — Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) has put a hold on reauthorization. If the hold is not released, or voted down by 61 senators, or if the House version of E-Verify isn't "hotlined" and passed on the Senate floor, E-Verify will disappear. Perhaps because of E-Verify's success, attacks on the program are intensifying. Assessing the credibility of such attacks is the purpose of this paper.

E-Verify Quick Facts

E-Verify is a voluntary web-based program to help U.S. businesses abide by long-standing immigration law requiring that they only employ legal aliens and U.S. citizens. Employers can sign up for the program by e-signing (signing electronically online) a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that lays out the responsibilities of both the employer and the government entities that support the program. The MOU only covers new hires.



Called the "Basic Pilot Program" until August 2007, E-Verify is designed to facilitate verification of authorized hires and provide more effective vetting of unauthorized workers. The key to the program is to maximize the facilitation of legitimate hires while also maximizing the opportunity to terminate illegitimate hires. The challenge is to narrow error rates on each side of this process so that legitimate hires are authorized near instantaneously while illegitimate hires are more quickly terminated. While E-Verify error rates are relatively low (about 5 percent of all queries), work continues on minimizing false positives and false negatives. That error rates are indeed small is confirmed by the fact that the proportion of new hires vetted and deemed unauthorized by E-Verify is roughly the same as the percentage of illegal workers in the total U.S. workforce, about 0.5 percent.

Improvements in speed, process, and data content have helped E-Verify become much better at rooting out fraud by illegal workers. Error rates have come down substantially for the entire pool being vetted, according to sources within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In addition, new procedures are enabling SSA and USCIS to streamline their matching and referrals. Further improvement will come when more categories of digital images taken for U.S. IDs, like passports and drivers licenses, are also made available through the Photo Screening Tool. This will help curb a longstanding problem of identity theft in the hiring process — i.e., use of legitimate IDs with substituted photos. Further reducing the ability of job applicants to feign legal work status with legitimate-looking IDs is a DHS priority for honing E-Verify.

The latest comprehensive review of E-Verify is awaiting final approval. Sources state that the error rates are down significantly from the numbers cited below — by as much as half of a percentage point, which is a serious improvement considering how small the error rates were in 2007. In addition, narrow cases of false positives and false negatives are under review at a USCIS fraud unit to assure the program continues to improve.

Some quick facts:

Overall accuracy of E-Verify as of first half of 2007: 99.5 percent

Employees authorized within the first 24 hours as of first half of 2007: 94.2 percent

93 percent are verified instantly — within five seconds.

1.2 percent are verified after an electronic, 24-hour USCIS check without any notification to the employee.4

Employees who received a mismatch as of the first half of 2007: 5.8 percent

5.1 percent from SSA

0.7 percent from USCIS5

Initial mismatches that must take action to obtain work authorization: 0.5 percent of mployees

0.4 are U.S. Citizens6

0.1 percent are non-citizens7

Initial mismatches later confirmed as work-authorized: 0.5 percent

0.4 percent are U.S. citizens

0.1 percent are non-citizens8

Employees not confirmed as work-authorized by E-Verify: 5.3 percent of employees "receive a final non-confirmation response because they are either not authorized to work in the United States, did not know that they had the opportunity to challenge an initial mismatch (or TNC), or choose not to follow the necessary procedures to prove work authorization after receiving an initial mismatch." 9

Social Security number duplicates: Duplicate SSNs were found more than twice in 21.9 percent of all transactions, 20.4 percent among those listed as U.S. citizens and 31.0 percent among non-citizens. 10

Rooting out bad identities: In FY 2007, E-Verify received about three million queries, of which 157,000 were found to be unauthorized to work despite having previously evaded the paper version of the I-9
process, thus stopping their illegal employment. 11

Rooting out document fraud: According to DHS, several hundred instances of document fraud have been detected by DHS's fraud unit. This number should grow as analysis gets more sophisticated.

Non-citizens who supply documents with DHS photos represent about 3.8 percent of all queries. The Photo Screening Tool was added in May 2008 for certain immigration cards used by non-U.S. citizens seeking authorization. 12
The State Department and the states are not yet supporting efforts to make passport and license photos accessible in E-Verify.

Reducing mismatches: As of May 2008, USCIS has made accessible naturalized citizen files to USCIS personnel for the purpose of verifying employee information through E-Verify. For example, if there is an initial mismatch of a naturalized citizen with SSA due to failure to change status with SSA, or a similar problem, the hire can call USCIS directly and get the matter resolved without being required to go to SSA to update their records. This has been the largest category of mismatches. 13

Employer enrollment is increasing exponentially: According to Stewart Baker, DHS Assistant Secretary of Policy, more than 10 percent of all new hires in the first two months of 2008 were checked by E-Verify, representing an exponential growth in its use. 14

When Basic Pilot became Web-based, 1,533 employers had signed up by the end of the first half of FY 2005. 15

As of August 2008 there were 78,000 employer MOUs representing over 315,000 sites and over five million queries processed. 16

As of September 13, 2008, there were 85,816 employer MOUs representing over 446,000 sites and over 6.21 million queries processed. 17

Cost effective: E-Verify is inexpensive.
"$100 or less in initial set-up costs for the Web Basic Pilot (E-Verify) and a similar amount annually to operate the system" 18

Total costs, including training and time, are estimated to be $419 per year for a federal contractor of 10 employees and about $9,000 per year for any company over 500 employees or, "less than 1 percent of expected revenue of these four sizes of small entities." 19

Processing new hires takes about five minutes to enter the new hire's information and to submit a query, and if the Photo Screening Tool is used, another five minutes. 20

State support for E-Verify: 11 states require use of E-Verify in certain circumstances (Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Utah), one encourages use (Tennessee), and one limits use (Illinois). 21

Much more...for the rest of the article:
http://www.cis.org/Everify