According to a report just released by the Social Security
Administration (SSA), the federal agency did not use the E-Verify
program to confirm the identity and employment eligibility of nearly 20
percent of their new hires. While E-Verify is required for all federal
workers and federal contractors and subcontractors, this report lends
to the idea that E-Verify may not be ready for full implementation at a
national level.
Much has been published about concerns about the validity of the
E-Verify program and the SSA’s admittance to its own internal conflicts
with the system further solidify those earlier concerns. In addition to
SSA’s inability to use E-Verify in nearly 20 percent of their new
hires, the federal agency also improperly ran verification checks on
nearly 170 volunteers and persons not yet hired, actions that were in
violation of federal law. In 2008, a survey conducted with workers in
Arizona, where mandatory laws requiring the use of E-Verify were active
at the time, revealed that just over 33 percent of 376 immigrant
workers had been fired due to errors in the E-Verify database and not
one of those fired workers were informed that they could have appealed
those incorrect findings.
