System to weed out illegal workers poses identity theft risk
Reported by: Christina Boomer
Email: cboomer@abc15.com
Last Update: 3/10 11:34 pm

System to weed out illegal workers poses identity theft risk


PHOENIX -- From the time E-Verify was a pilot program, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has routinely had the program reviewed to make improvements.

This has included speaking with employers to get their feedback on a range of issues.

Last year USCIS commissioned Westat, a research company, for its latest report.

At more than 300 pages, it tackles snapshots on which industries and states are using E-Verify, flushes out concerns, and documents the progress made by the program.

That includes doing a better job at making sure naturalized citizens don’t end up on the list of workers not allowed to work in this country.

But it also found that of the 6 percent of prospective workers employers ran through the system that were unauthorized, less than half were correctly identified.

More than half slipped through E-Verify and registered as being able to work in the United States. It was an inaccuracy rate of 54 percent.

The report states, “Due primarily to identity fraud, the inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers is approximately 54 percent. Thus, almost half of all unauthorized workers are correctly not found to be employment authorized (2.9/6.2) and just over half are found to be employment authorized (3.3/6.2). Consequently, the inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers is estimated to be approximately 54 percent with a plausible range of 37 percent to 64 percent. This finding is not surprising, given that since the inception of E-Verify it has been clear that many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify.â€