Chertoff: employers may escape fines

HR Magazine, Oct, 2008 by J.J. Smith

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will not fine business that inadvertently employ illegal aliens, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told SHRM Online.

"We [DHS] don't fine people for honest errors," Chertoff said Sept. 9, after a presentation on the nation's infrastructure at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. "People get fined when they knowingly violate the law."

Businesses that use the E-Verify system will not be fined if it turns out that E-Verify approved an applicant for employment because the worker used a stolen identity, Chertoff said.

There have been circumstances where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)--a DHS agency--has discovered by an audit of a business's Form I-9s or by a worksite raid that illegal aliens were using stolen identifications to gain work, Chertoff said. In those cases, ICE does not fine the business, but the illegal workers are arrested and deported. DHS understands that businesses need employees, "but we're not going to turn a blind eye to law breaking," he said.

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Businesses can avoid hiring illegal immigrants and the possibility of a workplace raid by participating in E-Verify, Chertoff said. Known as "Basic Pilot" when it was authorized by Congress in 1996, E-Verify is a mostly voluntary web-based system used to verify the work eligibility of individuals seeking employment in the United States. It compares information from Form I-9, the employee eligibility document used for new hires, against more than 425 million records in the Social Security Administration's database and--for noncitizens--more than 60 million records in DHS' immigration database.

About 65,000 employers are enrolled in E-Verify. That might increase by as many as 200,000 employers because on June 6 President Bush signed an executive order requiring all federal contractors to use E-Verify to confirm the status of their employees or risk losing their government contracts.

By J.J. Smith, an online editor/manager for SHRM.