E-Verify misses half of illegal workers checked

[pampango]

Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A study says an online program some employers use to weed out illegal workers misses more than half the people it's supposed to identify.

The research company that evaluated the E-Verify system for the Homeland Security Department found 54 percent of the illegal immigrants checked through E-Verify are cleared to work because they are using stolen or borrowed identities.

E-Verify allows employers to run a worker's information against Homeland Security Department and Social Security databases to check whether the person is permitted to work in the U.S. Congress and the Obama administration are urging employers to use E-Verify voluntarily to help curb illegal immigration.

E-Verify correctly identified legal workers 93 percent of the time.

Read more: http://www.ajc.com/news/nation-world/e-verify-misses-half-327930.html

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The study itself is at http://www.uscis.gov/USCIS/E-Verify/E-Verify/Final%20E-Verify%20Report%2012-16-09_2.pdf .

"... it is estimated that in approximately 96.0 percent of E-Verify cases submitted from April through June 2008, the E-Verify finding was consistent with the worker’s true employment-authorization status (an estimated 93.1 percent of all cases were cases in which an authorized worker was found to be employment authorized and 2.9 percent were unauthorized workers who were not found to be employment authorized). The remaining
cases (4.1 percent of all cases submitted to E-Verify) received a finding that was inconsistent with the worker’s true employment-authorized status (3.3 percent were unauthorized workers who were found to be work authorized and 0.7 percent were authorized workers not initially found to be employment authorized)."

"the inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers is approximately 54 percent. As seen in Exhibit 2, approximately 3.3 percent of all E-Verify findings are for unauthorized workers incorrectly found employment authorized and 2.9 percent of all findings are for unauthorized workers correctly not found employment authorized. Thus, almost half of all unauthorized workers are correctly not found to be employment authorized (2.9/6.2) and just over half are found to be employment authorized (3.3/6.2). Consequently, the inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers is estimated to be approximately 54 percent with a plausible range of 37 percent to 64 percent."

It's interesting to see actual figures from DHS on the accuracy of E-verify. The Obama administration has been pushing the use of E-verify as a quicker and more accurate way to determine a new employee's eligibility to work. The number of employers using this has increased 6-fold in the last 3 years.

[WriteDown]

1. May be easier to just flip a coin.

Why can't we get this to work?!

[420inTN]

3. The system is only as good as the data integrity

I used to work for a company that was working on E-verify.

As long as the system only relies on documents, there will always be false positives as documents can be forged or faked.

Here's how the system works (at least when i was working on it a few years ago);

1) employer collects all of the I-9 required data (social sec #, passport #, work visa #, etc) from the employee.
2) employer inputs the employee's name and data into the website.
3) e-verify company sends the data to DHS/SSAdmin who compares the data provided with stored data.
4) if all data matches, a positive result is sent to the employer, else a negative result is sent.

Until we start linking biometric information (fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.) to a person's identification records, then there is NO WAY to 100% positively identify the person presenting the documents as the actual owner of the documents.

However, that then presents privacy issues.

[WriteDown]

6. Don't think too many folks would volunteer for the chip implant or the bar code tatoo....

:)

[Alcibiades]

2. The system works!

Employers don't want a system that would correctly identify unauthorized workers: what E-Verify does is to give them legal cover so that they can staff their firms with folks willing to work for lower wages and benefits, while claiming to be fully in compliance.

"Except for situations of identity fraud detectable by the Photo Screening Tool, if the counterfeit documents are of reasonable quality and contain information about actual work-authorized persons who resemble the worker providing the documentation, the Form I-9 process and the E-Verify system will incorrectly confirm the bearer as work authorized."

One might conclude, therefore, that this system does not work, or one might conclude that the system is working EXACTLY as intended. At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, this Bush-era program is spending millions to put foreign nationals to work in our labor force, while at the same time yielding an unacceptably high rate of rejection of legal, foreign-born citizens. A system that enables a foreign national to work with illegally obtained "breeder" documents while denying work to foreign-born US citizens who have followed all the rules is simply unacceptable.

[Raston]

4. I couldn't agree more

If some of the unemployed engineers in the US were hired to design this, I assure you the system would work near-flawlessly. It was the fat cats who make the 'risk-acceptance' sign-offs, and how much do you wanna bet the design workforce was outsourced anyway?


- Raston


"If you're not angry, you're not paying attention."

[WriteDown]

5. See post #3 for a more likely scenario. nt

[420inTN]

8. I think you are misreading the results...

There are very few false negatives (0.7% i believe was stated above). The false negatives are those who are work authorized (US citizens and work authorized foreign nationals) but are initially flagged as not authorized. This low percentage could easily be explained by clerical errors (mistyping the employee's name or document information). There is not a "high rate of rejection of legal, foreign-born citizens."

The real issue is with the false positives (non-work authorized persons being identified as work authorized). These are usually the foreign nationals using forged, stolen, or purchased identification and documents.

However, as I stated above in post #3, there is no way for the employer to accurately determine that the person presenting the identification and documents are the legal owners of the ID and documents.

[Alcibiades]

10. See exhibit X-14

I absolutely agree that the main issue is with the false positives, but I was also addressing the specific case of false negatives for foreign-born US citizens and work-authorized foreign nationals. Having a system that enables employers to illegally hire non-work-authorized foreign nationals while issuing FNCs to any number of US citizens and others able to work legally is, in my view, fucked up.

You are correct in noting that the rate of false negatives for US born workers is very low, but the report notes that the FNC rates for foreign-born citizens and work-authorized foreign nationals is high, with foreign-born citizens having an erroneous FNC rate higher even than work-authorized foreign nationals (X-13). That's what I'm addressing: this is a system that enables employers to whitewash fraud on the part of employees, while erroneously issuing FNCs to foreign born American citizens at higher rate than work-authorized foreign nationals. That's fucked up.

It is possible to devise a system that prevents folks from working illegally: other countries do. If the government spends millions to devise a system that has a false positive rate this high, the simplest explanation may be the one I offered above.

[420inTN]

12. They're working on it.

Part of the problem with false negatives is on the government's part, and sometimes it's the applicant's fault.

On the government's side, the SSA and USCIS keep different data, only shared by name and date of birth. SSA goes by SSN whereas USCIS goes by A number as the prime identifiers.

If a naturalized citizen does not notify the SSA of their citizen status change, then they will still appear in the SSA data as a non-US citizen.

false negatives can also be caused by clerical errors such as a mis-typed foreign name or using the day-month-year date format which is the norm in europe, instead of the month-day-year format common in the US.

and 96.8% of foreign-born citizens pass on the first try. Only 3.2% have received a false positive. I wouldn't really say that a 1 in 31 rate is extremely high error rate.


from the gov't report:
-----------------------
The discrepancy in the erroneous TNC rates of native-born and foreign-born citizens is attributable, at least in part, to differences in the way that the USCIS and SSA databases are structured. The E-Verify system check against the SSA database indicates whether the worker is shown as a U.S. citizen on SSA’s records. The citizenship data in SSA’s records are dependent on whether workers report changes in citizenship status to the agency. However, it is not necessarily expected that people will update their SSA records when their citizenship status changes, and USCIS does not automatically provide SSA with information about naturalization. SSA may, therefore, not have the updated information needed to verify the work-authorization status of some foreign-born citizens. Until the institution of the Naturalization Phase I changes in early May 2008, SSA issued a TNC when this occurred. Currently, if the submitted SSN, name, and date of birth are consistent with SSA records but SSA does not have up-to-date information permitting them to determine whether a worker attesting to being a U.S. citizen is employment authorized, the case is electronically forwarded to USCIS for comparison with databases of persons naturalized beginning in the mid-1990s for determination of whether they are naturalized citizens. However, because U.S. citizens provide only their SSNs in the Form I-9 process and USCIS tracks by A-number, which is not available for these cases, USCIS must rely on matching on the SSN when available in USCIS records, and otherwise by name and date of birth.205 Although this permits USCIS to confirm that many workers have naturalized, such confirmation is not always possible.

Even in the absence of further program changes, the erroneous TNC rate for foreign-born citizens will decrease over time. USCIS does not have searchable electronic information on most persons naturalized before the mid-1990s, but they now capture naturalization data, including SSN, electronically. When the SSN is lacking for naturalized citizens, their USCIS records can be accessed only by A-number; however, former A-numbers are not requested from naturalized U.S. citizens on the Form I-9, which is the basis for the information used in electronic verification. This practice reflects a policy decision made when E-Verify was first designed to treat all citizens equally and not to reveal to employers which U.S. citizens are naturalized and which are native born. Furthermore, there is no requirement or expectation that naturalized citizens should know their former A-number.

As existing workers retire and are replaced by workers who have more recently become citizens and as foreign-born U.S. citizen workers update their SSA records as a part of E-Verify or other programs, more SSA records will reflect the correct citizenship status and the erroneous TNC rate for naturalized citizens will decline. However, this process will take considerable time.
In the absence of further changes to USCIS and E-Verify procedures, the erroneous TNC rate for persons who derived citizenship status when one or both of their parents were naturalized will not decline. Certificates of citizenship are not requested and issued for most children who derive citizenship status when one or both of their parents become naturalized citizens,206 resulting in USCIS having no documentation of their citizenship status. Even when a certificate is issued, USCIS does not electronically record the issuance in any system that could be used to verify their U.S. citizenship status. At the time the report was being written, USCIS was working with other DHS components and the Department of State to institute a check of U.S. passport information to permit E-Verify to confirm the citizenship status of persons who derived citizenship if they present a U.S. passport in the I-9 process. However, USCIS currently has no plans to update its electronic records based on hardcopy documentation for persons who derived citizenship in the past, nor have plans been made to routinely collect and enter this information into a USCIS database for additional children who derive U.S. citizenship.

[KamaAina]

7. "E-Verify correctly identified legal workers 93 percent of the time."

Translation: for every 14 legal workers who go through the system, one will be falsely flagged as illegal and be subject to investigation, or worse. :grr:

[420inTN]

9. Your math is bad

93.1% - authorized worker found to be employment authorized (true positive)
02.9% - non-authorized worker NOT found to be employment authorized (true negative)
03.3% - non-authorized worker found to be employment authorized (false positive)
00.7% - authorized worker NOT found to be employment authorized (false negative)

So, out of 1000 workers:
931 - legal workers authorized
029 - illegal workers not authorized
033 - illegal workers authorized
007 - legal workers not authorized

deit: So, for every 133 legal workers properly identified, there was only 1 legal worker not properly identified, which is a lot better than your 14:1 ratio.

[hunter]

11. Who is benefits from these false authorizations? That's all you need to know.

This system protects corporations who hire undocumented workers. It makes "illegal" employment practices legal.

What we really need to do is get rid of the system that abuses workers and depresses wages for everyone, legal or not.

Undocumented workers are disposable workers. They are fearful and discouraged from organizing or complaining about intolerable working conditions.

To solve the "illegal" worker problem we need to raise the minimum wage, vastly improve working conditions within the industries undocumented workers are typically employed by, support unionization, and provide an easy pathway to legal residency and eventual citizenship to anyone who is currently employed here.