Thread: USCIS e-Verify still flags eligible employees, says GAO

USCIS e-Verify still flags eligible employees, says GAO
January 19, 2011 — 1:26am ET | By David Perera

Statue of LibertyThe U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services electronic system used to check the legality of new employees has the potential to wrongly flag 180,000 people a year as ineligible to work in America, according to numbers from a new Government Accountability Office report.

The system, e-Verify, erroneously flags far fewer employees than before. But, during fiscal 2009, the system nonetheless flagged as ineligible .3 percent of employees run through it, despite their eligibility, the GAO says. The report is dated Dec. 17 but was not publically released until Jan. 18.

Were e-Verify to become mandatory for all American employers, that would amount to 180,000 wrongly flagged people a year, based on a size estimate of 60 million new hires a year. Mismatches between the federal databases e-Verify consults and names entered into the e-Verify system would account for 164,000 of those erroneous results, the report states.

The problem of mismatched names is particularly heightened when people from backgrounds that include Hispanic or Arab origin have multiple surnames. One government document might easily record the surnames' order differently, or exclude one surname, or abbreviate one of them, the report notes. Because foreign-born employees are more likely to have name issues, e-Verify's return of unconfirmed records "can lead to the appearance of discrimination," the report says.

Employees faced with an erroneous exclusion aren't informed which federal database returned the mismatch--and, as a result, may need to initiate Privacy Act queries at several Homeland Security Department components, should they wish to contest the result.

DHS treats Privacy Act requests like it does Freedom of Information Act requests: The response time during fiscal 2009 was about 104 days for each request, the report says. Department privacy officials told GAO auditors they're discussing with senior e-Verify officials ways to provide employees with better access to relevant information, including notifying them which types of records e-Verify consulted.

E-Verify also remains vulnerable to fraud since employers might not be able to tell when an employee gives them falsified identity and employment eligibility documents. Actually, some employers have taken to asking for identity documents that won't cause e-Verify to match database-stored photos of individuals with a photo of the employee, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Arizona told GAO auditors. E-Verify will attempt to match stored photos with documents when presented with a permanent resident card or employment authorization documents, but not when presented with a driver's license.

"ICE officials said that they know of instances in which employers directed employees to provide driver's licenses...They said this has led to an increase in the fraudulent use of other documents, which are not part of the photo matching tool," the report says.

Obvious fraud, too--such as multiple uses of the same social security number--has a pattern when it comes to employers gaming the e-Verify system, but USCIS employees must spot it manually, the report adds.

The agency is planning to have online by fiscal 2012 a $6 million automated data mining capability called the Data Analysis System, the report states. E-Verify first came online more than a decade ago, in 1997.

Read more: USCIS e-Verify still flags eligible employees, says GAO - FierceGovernmentIT http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story ... z1BVF37blw
Subscribe: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/signu ... vernmentIT

Eligible employees are easily able to prove their status.

Originally Posted by ReggieMay

Eligible employees are easily able to prove their status.

This is correct. No legal resident has ever loss a job, because of E-Verify.
Many of the mis-matches are because people simply don't use the identical (legal) name they documented with the SSA.

We have hired professional nurses that have documented different names on the DL, nursing license and social security card. Many times it's due to a marriage or divorce, but I don't hire them until they straighten it out. Sometimes it's a two or three day delay.

Usually just a typo that needs to be corrected.

American citizens and legal aliens should not be penalized for errors in the database. They should be informed of the rejection by eVerify and given a means of readily correcting the problem. Unfortunately many databases store names in disparate manners. Some will not allow a space in a last name such as "Van Dyke" therefore it is forced to be entered as "VanDyke" thereby disagreeing with all other databases. Some databases allow names with accent marks--some don't. Some data bases don't remove trailing spaces accidentally entered thereby making "Smith" different from "Smith ". In New Jersey there was a famous case of a man whose last name was "O". He couldn't be issued a driver's license because the database would not allow a single letter for the last name. It was finally issued to him as "Oh". I could go on and on with examples like this.

The baby shouldn't be thrown out with the bathwater IMO. Compared to the number of new hires per year the error rate is very low. These errors can easily be corrected if the potential employee is truly eligible to work in this country. The fact that e-verify isn't 100% accurate is the argument used against it by the pro-illegal advocates. We cannot allow them to stop e-verify from being implemented because they have an agenda. Continued perfection of e-verify should be the goal while still using it in the meantime.

This is one reason that when we fill out applications or forms we use the same name as it appears on the SS card and other legal documents. In data bases...close is not an option. I also agree that legal citizens are very much able to prove they are legal but it simply delays the proccess if the information does not match the E Verify data. New technology always has bugs. Just ask Microsoft. Look at all the bugs they have had to work through with the various versions of windows. E Verify is no different. Once it is modified and reshaped it can be merged with other data bases which will give Law Enforcement real time documentation checking capabilities.