Fact of the Week: 5/15/08

• In an attempt to quell concerns about E-Verify inaccuracies and the potential impact on U.S. citizens and other legal workers, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service claimed in a May 5, 2008 press release that “less than one percent of all work-authorized employees receive a tentative nonconfirmation through E-Verify.”
• Richard Stana, Director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues at the Government Accountability Office, called this statistic “misleading,” in testimony before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security on May 6, 2008.
• According to GAO, “The majority of E-Verify queries entered by employers – about 92 percent – confirm within seconds that the employee is work-authorized.  About 7 percent of the queries cannot be immediately confirmed as work authorized by the Social Security Administration, and about 1 percent cannot be immediately confirmed as work authorized by USCIS because employees’ information queried through the system does not match information in SSA or DHS databases.”
• Given the high non-confirmation rates cited by GAO, millions of U.S. citizens and legal workers could be negatively impacted if E-Verify were to be mandated for use by all 7.4 million U.S. employers.

NEVA requires advance resources, accuracy standards, and annual reporting to Congress to ensure the system is efficient and protects individual privacy.

To learn more, visit www.legal-workforce.org.

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The Human Resource Initiative for a Legal Workforce (www.legal-workforce.org) represents human resource professionals in thousands of small and large U.S. employers representing every sector of the American economy.  The HR Initiative and its members are seeking to improve the current process of employment verification by creating a secure, efficient and reliable system that will ensure a legal workforce and help prevent unauthorized employment, a root cause of illegal immigration.