Don’t tie student employment program to E-Verify

If nothing else, the Department of Homeland Security is persistent — even when it comes to forcing a flawed and outdated program upon U.S. employers.

The department is currently pushing its E-Verify employment verification program by tying it to the ability of U.S. employers to hire foreign students graduating from U.S. colleges and universities. This is just one more in a long list of bad ideas designed to promote an ineffective method of verifying workers’ legal status. This time it’s being used as the penalty that must be paid by companies that want to employ the scientists, engineers and medical professionals our country needs.

Originally known as Basic Pilot, E-Verify was launched by the federal government more than 10 years ago. Since that time, it’s remained virtually unchanged. It’s still decidedly basic, and it’s still unproven. The program’s shortcomings are especially obvious when contrasted with major advances in the technologies that would make a foolproof employment verification system possible.

The latest DHS ploy to promote this 10-year old clunker is to tie it to the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program that allows foreign students graduating from U.S. institutions to stay and work here after graduation.

The program was designed to give graduates with job offers enough time for their appropriate work visas to be processed, after their student visas have expired.

The good news: The administration, through DHS, recently announced that the OPT period would be extended from 12 months to 29 months. This extension recognizes that the majority of these recent graduates will be unable to get a work visa within one year due to high demand for the limited numbers of H-1B visas, which are reserved for highly educated workers. It was also a commonsense recognition that without this extension, the United States would lose thousands of talented individuals — students we have educated — to competitor nations.

The bad news: Employers must pay a penalty. The extension only applies to students hired by employers participating in E-Verify. So, employers must make a choice — lose the value of a new hire or agree to take on the liabilities of an employment verification system that is unreliable and inadequate.

To date, less than 1 percent of U.S. employers have registered to use E-Verify. It’s no wonder. The system is based on outdated databases and paper documents. Employers are still required to complete the paper Form I-9 after analyzing as many as 25 documents that an employee can use for identity and work authorization purposes.

Mandating it will lock in the paper-based, error-prone, ineffective and insecure I-9 system that employers have learned to hate during the past 10 years. E-Verify still can’t detect document fraud or identity theft — two common tactics used by unauthorized workers to beat the system and get jobs.

If that’s not bad enough, E-Verify also is dependent on the Social Security database. According to testimony before Congress by the Social Security Administration’s own Office of the Inspector General, there is a 4.1 percent error rate. Let’s do the math: If all U.S. employers had to use the system, as many as six million U.S. citizens and legal residents could be denied employment due to bureaucratic error.  And the error rate for legal foreign-born workers is estimated to be as high as 10 percent — opening the door to increased workplace discrimination on national origin.

Employers shouldn’t be put in a no-win situation — subjecting them to stiff penalties if they mistakenly hire an unauthorized worker while exposing them to potential lawsuits if they deny employment to a legal worker — all because of faulty government data and processes.

It’s not that employers don’t want a national employment verification system. Human resource professionals are clamoring for one — but it has to work. In fact, employer groups have endorsed the New Employee Verification Act, a superior alternative to E-Verify now under consideration by Congress.

But until better sense prevails, DHS marches on in its attempts to mandate a seriously flawed system. Doing so by handcuffing the ability of business to hire the talent it needs is truly big government at its worst.

Meisinger is president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, and a founding leader of the HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce coalition.