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IMMIGRATION

Gold Kist fights documents fraud
Poultry firm says U.S. data key to legality in hiring

By MARGARET COKER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/13/06
WASHINGTON — As far as Atlanta-based Gold Kist is concerned, the best way to curb the number of illegal immigrants working in America is to do what the company has been doing for nine years.

Gold Kist, a poultry company, checks documents held by its approximately 8,000 immigrant employees through an online system run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Service Administration.

Within minutes, it usually has an answer: The job applicant may or may not work in the United States.

"It's really worked well for us. It's the best program that the government has offered to us to make us compliant with the law," said Wayne Lord, vice president of corporate relations for Gold Kist.

As Congress examines ways to block the hiring of illegal immigrants in America, lawmakers are focused on making employers a more robust first line of defense. Both the House and Senate are considering making it mandatory for all 5.8 million U.S. employers to use the federal program that Gold Kist and a couple thousand other businesses voluntarily participate in now.

But what has helped the Georgia company weed out illegal immigrants from its work force won't solve the problem nationwide, federal officials and immigration experts warn.

While the Basic Pilot Program works well for companies that want to comply with federal mandates, the system has large holes that allow both businesses and illegal immigrants determined to skirt the law to keep doing so.

Stopping illegal immigration "is like saying we are going to win the war on drugs," said Michael Everitt, the head of the DHS Forensics Document Laboratory, the headquarters of the government's anti-fraud division.

"There's no easy solution. There's no silver bullet. The best you can hope for, however, is better than what we have right now."

Federal security officials estimate that most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country have fraudulent Social Security cards, the document that is necessary for work in America.

Currently, the only system for employers to verify the immigration status of workers is the Basic Pilot Program.

Since 1997, with a mandate from Congress, government officials have been developing a computer database that would be able to quickly and effectively check a job applicant's Social Security number.

Immigration and Social Security Administration officials started testing the service that year with business volunteers in five immigrant-heavy states, including Florida and Texas. Last year, the government made it available to any employer in the country.

Gold Kist is a veteran of the program, with its plants in Florida participating from almost the first day.

The Basic Pilot program is easy to use, Lord said. Human resource officials log onto a government Web site, enter the Social Security number given by the applicant, and that number is run through government databases to affirm whether it is valid.

If the number is found within the database, the response is immediate: The person is approved for work. If the number is not found, then he or she has to go to a local Social Security office to check the online response and receive a work verification certificate if it was wrong.

However, the system does not provide answers to whether the number offered by a job applicant is actually a number that is assigned to him — or whether it's a number that was fraudulently obtained.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, audited the Basic Pilot Program last year and concluded that the system does an acceptable job detecting some cases of attempted fraud.

One such case is when a business uses the same Social Security number for multiple workers — a good indicator that an employer is trying to hire large numbers of illegal immigrants.

The program can also ferret out gross examples of counterfeiting, such as when a potential employee has a Social Security number with all zeros — a typical display on a forged card, the GAO said in a report issued last August.

Where it falls flat, however, is the issue of identity fraud and fraudulently obtained documents, the report said.

"How do you know if the card given to you by the guy in front of you is actually the guy that should be carrying the card in his pocket? The answer is you don't and the government doesn't," said Audrey Sawyer, an immigration expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Everitt, a 20-year veteran forensic investigator, recommends creating a card that every immigrant would need to have for work. It would include security coding that would make it hard to counterfeit, much like the technology going into printing money, and perhaps some biometric information.

"This would close the gaps on any question about whether the person and the card match," Everitt said. "The technology and know-how is there for such a solution."

Despite the concerns with Basic Pilot, Congress has made it the focal point in legislation about what role employers should play in deterring illegal immigration.

Along with tougher sanctions for businesses that hire illegal immigrants, a bill passed by the House would require all businesses to screen all employees on their payroll as well as new hires — a number that reaches to about 140 million people.

A Senate bill that could come to a vote next week proposes screening new hires and a limited number of people hired previously — specifically, those who have jobs important to the nation's security.

The GAO estimates that the cost of designing and issuing a secure ID for immigrant workers would cost the federal government billions of dollars.

Officials working for the biometric industry say a solution would be cost-effective for businesses because the price of biometric readers have become viable for commercial use.

Everitt, however, says it would be worth it, no matter the controversies raised by privacy advocates or immigration activists.

"Creating a program to issue a secure ID or national card, call it whatever you want to, is the best way to curb illegal immigration," he said.

Lord says that his company is happy with the Basic Pilot program, although he doesn't like the way it turns human resources employees into amateur detectives.

He also believes that Gold Kist's participation in the program deters illegal immigrants from applying for jobs at the company, a fact he deduces from the decreasing number of attempted forgeries his HR department comes across.

Still, if the law required a national ID card for employment verification, Gold Kist would gladly switch to the new system.

"We will follow the letter of the law no matter what it says," Lord said.