Source:
Atlanta Journal-ConstitutionA 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
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.