The Immigration Policy Center put out a report this week on E-Verify in Arizona. It was a scathing report about how the system has failed, based on news report. We think it’s about as authoritative as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce study that came out in late April that said a whole bunch of Americans would lose their jobs if mandatory employment eligibility measures were put into place.
Our fairness disclaimer: Our product is a gateway into the E-Verify system, which many people think sucks (and they’re not entirely wrong, but not entirely right, either).
That said, we want to talk today about “The Gap.” This is the difference between the reported reality of the system and what we’re seeing on the ground, particularly when it comes to people not being able to get any of their information corrected if they get a tentative non-confirmation. This is cited in the IPC’s report, and it was cited over and over and over at last week’s Congressional hearings on E-Verify.
But the fact is that we haven’t seen it. Somewhere up above 90 percent of our clients’ tentative non-confirmations get resolved within the eight Federal business days. The rest? About half go uncontested and the employee is never seen again that day. The remainder say they’re going to contest it, then never come back to work. Or work for a couple days then are never seen again.
We asked one of our biggest clients about this. They’re a good representative client: a multi-unit restaurant company that has a high hiring throughput (over 1,000 new hires a year) and tends to attract lower wage earners.
This was our exact question: “There’s a lot of talk about qualified people not being to stay on after tentative non-confirmations because they can’t get in to SSAs office to get their information changed. Have you seen that?”
The answer: “Not at all. Never. We see people who get tentative non-confirmations not coming back after the first day. Or we see people go and get it figured out.”
We asked another client of ours, a 100-200 employee company in the construction industry, if they were losing employees because of calendar issues after a tentative non-confirmation result.
The answer: “Never. Our tentative confirmations usually don’t contest, and they just walk out of the office. When they’ve challenged them and gotten them resolved they can usually do it in a long afternoon.”
So you’ve got “The Gap” between what’s being said and what’s actually happening out here.
The E-Verify debate is becoming the abortion debate of the employment-law world, and facts are getting lost in the shuffle.
Here’s a line from the IPC report:
Ken Nagel, a restaurant owner in Phoenix, recently hired one of his daughters—a native-born U.S. citizen—to work in his restaurant. When he put her information through E-Verify, he received a “tentative nonconfirmation,” meaning the system could not verify that she was authorized to work in the United States.4
The fact comes out of a March 3, 2008 story in The Arizona Republic. What’s never answered is why. My guess is that the daughter is married and used a different last name in the E-Verify input than was listed in the SSA database.
Probably 50 percent of our tentative non-confirmations are because of last name misalignments.
