In government, too: you'll find illegal aliens in the darndest places

National Review, July 9, 2007 by Terence P. Jeffrey

NEARLY everyone professes to agree that the government should crack down on employers who hire illegal aliens. But it appears that the government needs, first, to crack down on itself. That's the story told in a footnote of an audit report quietly released a year ago by the inspector general of a federal agency that seemingly has nothing to do with immigration.

It indicates that the Bush administration itself has employed aliens not authorized to work in the United States. Year after year, first the Justice Department and then the Department of Homeland Security were given information that would have allowed them to pinpoint exactly who these unauthorized alien workers were and which federal agencies employed them. Yet, by the end of the period covered by the audit report (which ran through tax year 2003), the problem remained unsolved. (The inspector general has not yet analyzed the relevant data for tax years after 2003.)

Which agencies employed these aliens? The government won't say. Citing a provision in the tax code, the inspector general's office says it is prohibited from publicly identifying them, and so, for now, they stay "in the shadows."

The audit report is innocuously titled "Employers with the Most Wage Items in the Nonwork Alien File." It was published in June 2006 by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration (SSA), and is publicly available on SSA's website. The audit was designed to discover the 100 employers that had filed the largest number of W-2 forms in tax years 2001 through 2003 for employees who were using what SSA calls "nonwork" Social Security Numbers (SSNs). These are SSNs that SSA gives to aliens who are not entitled to work in the U.S. but who claim to need an SSN anyway.

Prior to 1996, SSA handed these numbers out like candy. According to a 1999 inspector general's report, an alien who had no right to work in the U.S. could nonetheless get an SSN "for a variety of reasons including tax, banking, school, insurance, driver's license, and government benefit purposes." After reforms made in 1996, an alien could still get a "nonwork" SSN in order to secure a driver's license or claim a government benefit to which he was entitled even though he was not entitled to work in the U.S. In 2003, SSA stopped giving out nonwork SSNs for driver's licenses.

But the damage was done. By 1998, there were already more than 7 million "nonwork" SSNs in circulation--a number exceeding the combined populations of Rhode Island, New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware. Not surprisingly, many aliens used these "nonwork" SSNs to work illegally in the U.S.

To deal with this problem, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 mandated that SSA create a list every year called the NWALIEN file. This list includes the names and addresses of every worker and every employer associated with a W-2 bearing a nonwork SSN. The law mandated that SSA provide this list annually to the Justice Department, which contained the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). In 2003, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took over the functions of INS, SSA started sending the list to DHS.

Because some aliens originally given nonwork SSNs eventually secure work visas or green cards, and because the DHS does not notify SSA when this happens, the raw NWALIEN file produced by SSA includes names of many people who are currently authorized to work in the U.S. All DHS would need to do to create a detailed road map for worksite enforcement against one type of immigration lawbreaking, however, is double check the NWALIEN list against its own work-authorization data.

As part of its audit, for example, the SSA inspector general's office checked a random sample of 275 "nonwork" W-2s against DHS data. Thirty-seven percent of the workers named on these W-2s, it turned out, had indeed secured authorization to work in the U.S. Sixty-one percent, however, had not. For another five people in the sample (2 percent), DHS could find no records at all.

Thirty-six of the 275 randomly sampled "nonwork" W-2s were for government workers. Sixteen of these 36 government workers (44 percent) had never been authorized to work in the U.S. Also, one of the five workers for whom DHS had no records was a government employee.

In fact, government itself, the inspector general determined, was the nation's most egregious filer of W-2s with nonwork SSNs. Seventeen of the top 100 employers for filing these questionable W-2s were federal, state, or local government agencies. From 2001 to 2003, these agencies collectively filed 49,380 W-2s with nonwork SSNs, reporting $1.5 billion in tax dollars paid to employees who might not be authorized to work in the U.S.

If, in keeping with the inspector general's random sample, 44 percent of the 49,380 "nonwork" W-2s filed by government agencies were filed on behalf of aliens not authorized to work here, that would mean these agencies filed more than 21,000 W-2s for unauthorized aliens in a three-year period.