E-Verify not being used by the agency in charge of running it.

January 18 2010 by Liam Clifford

Employees being hired by the Social Security department are not being adequately checked.

Even though they are meant to be helping run the government's new hi-tech database, which is intended to uncover illegal workers, the department of Social Security in the U.S. has fails to carry out E-Verify checks on the employees it hires nearly 20 per cent of the time, a new audit by the Social security administrations’ inspector has revealed

The audit says the agency clearly failed to confirm up to 19 per cent of the new employees it hired in 2008/2009, the audit also claimed that of the checks run, most were not done in a satisfactory way.

What makes this even more embarrassing is that the social security agency along with U.S. immigration and citizenship, are in charge of running E-verify, the new tool expected to become mandatory for all U.S. businesses.

Some U.S. businesses and U.S. immigration groups have not been keen on using the new E-verify technology, arguing that the error rate is far to high at the moment, however other areas of commerce have welcomed E-verify as a way to prove to U.S. immigration, customers and authorities that they are seeking every effort to follow the letter of the law.

E-verify works through a system that employers send the name of new employees through the system and they are issued with either a positive or negative response that the individual is allowed to work in the country. Critics say that the U.S. immigration system often issues negative responses wrongly, either through the person not being registered correctly to begin with or a change in name.

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