Contractors oppose rule on employee citizenship verification
By Gregg Carlstrom
From Federal Times online (http://www.federaltimes.com/index.php?S=3677392)

Contractors are opposing a government plan that would require them to verify the immigration status of their employees.

They say the proposed plan, which could take effect in the next few months, would be a huge drain on their human resources staff. And they argue that there’s little evidence contractors are employing illegal immigrants.
 
The proposal would affect companies that win new federal contracts — they would be required to verify the immigration status of all employees working on a contract within 30 days of receiving it, including those working abroad. Contractors would also have to verify all new hires — whether or not they perform government work — for the duration of the contract.
 
The Homeland Security Department proposed the rule in June, in response to an executive order from President Bush directing agencies to verify that their contract employees are legally employed. Companies would be required to use E-Verify, the electronic verification system managed by Citizenship and Immigration Services.
 
More than 100 public comments on the proposed rule were sent to Homeland Security, mostly from contractors calling on the department to scuttle the plan. Criticism came from Lockheed Martin, Dynamics Research Corporation, IntelliDyne, the Professional Services Council, the Society for Human Resource Management, and a number of religious groups that advocate for immigrants’ rights.
 
Contracting groups have two main concerns about E-Verify. They claim it is not capable of handling so much activity, and that it generates a high number of incorrect results.
 
“E-Verify is just not ready,” said Olga Grkavac, executive vice president of the Information Technology Association of America. “Government and industry need time to improve the system and scale it, from limited use to the millions of private-sector employees working for the federal government.”

Industry advocates complain the new rule would have a major impact on business. The larger contractors would be required to check tens of thousands of employees — and even if each query takes only one minute, as CIS estimates, the burden adds up.
 
The Office of Management and Budget estimates the regulation would cost employers about $300 million over the next 10 years.
 
But CIS officials say the requirement won’t place a big burden on contractors. The Web-based query asks for only a few basic pieces of information: name, date of birth, Social Security number, and — for foreign-born employees — their green card number. It then runs that information through databases at the Social Security Administration and CIS to verify that the employees are in fact working legally.

“When a company signs up, their HR staff spends two hours on a tutorial, and the program is free,” said Gerri Ratliff, deputy assistant director for national security records verification at CIS. “After that, it takes maybe 60 seconds to run a query.”

Ratliff also says E-Verify is ready to take on more activity. It’s now an optional program for companies; CIS estimates about 1,000 new employers sign up each month. The program handled 3 million queries last year, and Ratliff says it’s on pace to process twice that number in 2008. CIS conducted a stress test on the system earlier this year, and it was able to handle about 200 million annual queries.

The agency has invested heavily in the program since it was launched five years ago: E-Verify started with a $3 million budget and seven full-time employees; today, it has about 150 employees, and an annual budget of more than $110 million.
 
The percentage of queries that deem a person unauthorized to work has come down significantly, from 21 percent in 2003 to about 6 percent today. CIS says most of those results are never contested, so they are probably accurate. The agency estimates that less than 1 percent of results are incorrect, usually because of errors in the Social Security Administration’s databases.
 
Still, for some large contractors, that could mean dozens of employees could be wrongly singled out as suspicious.
 
And many complained that they will have a hard time finding subcontractors because the proposal is an even bigger hardship for small companies.
“The subcontractor [verification] requirements will be virtually impossible for a small business like us,” wrote Jason Lemmon, president of Onboard Systems International, a Washington-based information technology contractor. “We’re happy if we can just get subcontractors to provide their services. … If we try to enforce programs like [E-Verify], they will just say no to our business.”
 
Contracting groups also object to the requirement that existing employees be verified, especially since there have been no reports of widespread hiring of illegal immigrants by contractors.
 
“Federal contractors should not be subjected to any greater requirement than federal employees,” said Alan Chvotkin, president of the Professional Services Council. “And today, only new federal employees are required to be verified.”

Attorneys say there may be a legal argument against the scope of the proposed regulation. The law that created the I-9 Employment Eligibility Verification form only required its completion for new hires; existing employees cannot be asked about their immigration status.

“There’s a legal argument that E-Verify was meant to be a one-time thing,” said Eric Bord, an attorney at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, a Washington law firm that specializes in immigration cases. “The notion of I-9 [immigration] verification is that … you don’t get I-9s from existing employees.”

And many contractors, particularly in security-related fields, already perform extensive background checks on their employees, Bord said. That means the use of E-Verify could often be redundant.
 
But officials at CIS disagree, saying that a standardized system for checking immigration status would be beneficial.

“The federal government uses E-Verify, too, and we also have extensive background checks [at some agencies],” Ratliff said. “It’s important to have a standardized way to verify. … Companies may not be doing it the best way.”
 
And immigration groups agree, saying the system is an important first step toward making E-Verify a mandatory program.
 
“Starting with federal contractors is a way of phasing in the system and institutionalizing E-Verify as a best practice in more and more sectors of the economy,” said Jon Feere, a policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies.
 
Agencies are currently reviewing the public comments, and a final decision on the regulation is expected in the next few months.