The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just published a notice
in the Federal Record in which it rescind previous amendments related
to how employers should respond when they receive no match letters.
This recent notice calls for rescinding the August 2007 No-Match Rule
and the 2008 Supplemental Final Rule.
The original 2007 rule described the obligations employers had when
they received no-match letters from the Social Security Administration
(SSA) or a letter regarding employment verification from DHS. These
letters are sent when an employee’s stated Social Security number does
not match the numbers in the SSA’s existing database. In addition the
2007 rule provided ‘Safe Harbors,’ rules employers could follow that
would establish that the employer did not have knowledge that the
employee in question was an unauthorized alien. If an employer is shown
to have knowledge of an employee’s unauthorized status, that employer
can be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
The current notice comes as DHS now believes they have created
substantial improvements in E-Verify program (the electronic employment
verification system) and other federal programs to provide the
resources employers need to reduce instances of unauthorized
employment. DHS believes that a better use of resources would be to
focus efforts on enforcement and community outreach to “increase
compliance through improved verification, including increased
participation in the USCIS’s E-Verify employment eligibility
verification system, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ICE
Mutual Agreement Between Government and Employers (IMAGE), and other
programs.”
