According to the Social Security Administration (SSA), employers have enrolled to use E-Verify at more than one million worksites. More than 2,500 new employers are enrolling every week. The number of employers enrolled in E-Verify has more than doubled since 2009. E-Verify is administered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the SSA. The program’s focus is always on continuing to improve its performance. E-Verify is improving ever year. In fiscal year (FY) 2011, more than 98% of workers were automatically confirmed as work authorized, instantly or within 24 hours. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that E-Verify had reduced mismatches by more than five percentage points from 8% in 2007 to 2.6% in 2009. In FY 2010, that rate went even lower - to 1.7%. E-Verify participation grows dramatically, while the system’s performance improves significantly every year. Here are some of the enhancements E-Verify has made over the past few years:
Photo matching
Photo matching, introduced in 2007, improved E-Verify’s ability to detect and combat identity fraud. The feature allows participating employers to compare photos on employment authorization documents or permanent resident cards, and now U.S. passport photos, to images stored in DHS databases.
Naturalization data
Naturalization data was added to E-Verify in 2008. This reduced the number of mismatches for naturalized citizens by 35 percent. With the addition of passport data in 2010, the E-Verify mismatches were further reduced by more than 81,000.
Self check
Self Check was initially launched in March 2011 to five states and made available nationwide in February 2012. This innovative service allows individuals to verify and learn how to correct their own records before they meet their next employer.
RIDE
RIDE initiative, launched in June 2011, is E-Verify’s first collaboration with a state Department of Motor Vehicles to verify information from the most commonly presented identity document the driver’s license. Mississippi is the first state partner in the RIDE program, and hopefully other states will follow.
To learn more, visit www.dhs.gov/E-Verify. (SSA/IRS Reporter, Summer 2012
This information is intended to be educational and should not be considered legal advice on any specific matter.
