Work bill would create new ID database

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The idea also appeared in the Senate's immigration proposal last year. But a handful of U.S. senators including Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat, introduced an amendment, which passed 59-39, that was supported by the ACLU because it would have allowed Americans to sue the government for back pay and attorneys fees if they were wrongfully denied employment through the electronic screening process. The latest bill does not allow such an option.

"We need an electronic verification system that can effectively detect the use of fraudulent documents, significantly reduce the employment of illegal workers, and give employers the confidence that their workforce is legal," Obama said in a statement at the time.

According to a Congressional Budget Office report last year (PDF), similar verification requirements in last year's Senate bill were expected to produce "very few EEVS errors that would lead to compensation for lost wages, particularly for native-born workers." Specifically, the office predicted 10 errors per million inquiries for native-born workers and a 0.4 percent error rate for foreign-born workers, which they estimated would decline to 0.025 percent by 2011 because of "system improvements."

But Sparapani argued that virtually all government databases are "riddled with errors" and predicted inconveniences for workers beholden to the nationwide system would be commonplace, particularly if "they set this thing up and do not build in an instant 24-hour hotline with people at an administrative agency, hiring thousands of (people) to answer phone calls and handle data requests."

A year and a half to comply
The immigration bill currently being debated would effectively make today's voluntary system mandatory and expand it to check birth and death records, Department of State passport and visa records, and state drivers license records. By 2013, if a person wanted to present a drivers license, it would have to be one that complies with the requirements of the controversial Real ID Act. (A valid passport or a combination of vital records documents could generally be substituted.)

The changes would take place through multiple steps. Within 18 months of the bill's enactment, all employers would be required to verify new hires or any existing employees whose documentation had expired. Some industries, such as those that deal with homeland security or contract with the government, would be compelled to participate almost immediately upon the bill's passage.

The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 employers would have to be enrolled in the system each day to get everyone covered during that period, which would likely require huge budget increases and the creation of a new bureaucracy at Homeland Security.

No later than three years after the bill's enactment, all employers would be required to verify the work eligibility of each of their employees--regardless of how long they have been employed--who had not yet been screened.

According to the Government Accountability Office, last year's immigration proposal, which included similar provisions, was estimated to cost $11.7 billion per year. Bush administration officials fielding reporters' questions at a press conference last week weren't able to pin a number to this year's effort.

Another glaring problem, critics say, is that the current screening system has not proven itself resistant to fraud.

Notably, it doesn't have any way of directly determining whether a job applicant has presented an entirely fabricated identity, which is what led to a high-profile flap last year involving illegal workers at six meatpacking facilities operated by Swift & Co.

Raids by Homeland Security Department agents in December resulted in thousands of immigration-related arrests, including charges that hundreds of people had stolen others' identities to secure jobs with the Greeley, Colo.-based company. But as a Swift executive told a House of Representatives committee last month, the company had "played by all the rules," counting itself as one of the few U.S. employers that had used Basic Pilot since 1997, but had concluded as a result of the raids that the system is "fatally flawed."

"As currently structured, Basic Pilot does not detect duplicate active records in its database," John Shandley, the company's senior vice president of human resources, told politicians. "The same Social Security number could be in use at another employer, and potentially multiple employers, across the country."

In a recent statement about the bill, the White House maintained that the proposal will allow for "unprecedented" information sharing among federal and state agencies, and that Homeland Security will be able to receive "information on multiple uses of the same Social Security number by more than one individual."

One provision in the bill calls for the design of the verification system to "allow for auditing use of the system to detect fraud and identify theft," including development of algorithms that "detect potential identity theft, such as multiple uses of the same identifying information or documents."

The expanded, mandatory system would also have to be devised in a way that allows employers to compare the photograph of a person on an identity document presented during the hiring process against digital photographs stored in databases by whoever issued the identity card, such as a motor vehicle employee.

Finally, the bill includes broadly worded provisions that attempt to make the underlying documents less prone to counterfeiting. It calls for the Social Security Administration, for instance, to issue "fraud-resistant, tamper-resistant and wear-resistant" cards and to consider the feasibility of including a photograph and other biometric information as well.

The ACLU's Sparapani argued that the bill's penalties for noncompliance aren't tough enough to discourage unscrupulous employers from continuing to pay undocumented workers under the table. Under the new rules, "the black market economy is likely to grow rather than shrink," he said.