3/1/2008 - New Employee Verification Act Introduced in House
The New Employee Verification Act was introduced on February 27 by Representative Sam Johnson of Texas. The proposed legislation would eliminate the current I-9 requirement and the E-Verify system and replace them with a new mandatory electronic system comparing employee data to the Directory of New Hires - a database currently used for the purpose of tracking "Deadbeat Dads" in connection with child support enforcement. The data would also be compared to the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security Databases.
The bill creates an additional level of oversight through the addition of a voluntary system - if employers choose to participate, additional background checks would be run on those accepting employment with these companies and biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints, collected from new hires. The bill also increases employer penalties for failure to comply with its terms, and increases the ability of various government agencies to share information.
This proposed legislation can be compared and contrasted with the SAVE Act, also pending in congress, which offers the same bleak enforcement-only approach to immigration reform by through dramatically increased burdens on U.S. employers.
The SAVE Act, however, accomplishes this by mandating use of the existing online E-Verify system which compares employee document information to Social Security and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Databases. Both proposals, while mandating different systems tied to a different combination of databases, unduly burden U.S. employers and threaten the jobs of employment-eligible US workers by subjecting their right to earn a living to notoriously flawed data sources.
Both the New Employee Verification Act and the SAVE Act are bad ideas for American employers and workers, and we encourage those concerned to write to their elected officials and express their views against both initiatives:
This is yet another enforcement-only program which provides no means of addressing the reasons why U.S. business have such great difficulty in locating sufficient U.S. workers or legally employing willing non-U.S. workers. It would, however, manage to provide significant additional burdens to U.S. employers already struggling with an unstable economic climate and cause for fear to legal U.S. workers who might lose their jobs for no other reason than a missed keystroke during data entry.
All U.S. employers and U.S. workers!