In 1986, IRCA established the employment verification process based on employers’ review of documents presented by employees to prove identity and work eligibility. On the Form I-9, employees must attest that they are U.S. citizens, lawfully admitted permanent residents, or aliens authorized to work in the United States. Employers must then certify that they have reviewed the documents presented by their employees to establish identity and work eligibility and that the documents appear genuine and relate to the individual presenting them. In making their certifications, employers are expected to judge whether the documents presented are obviously counterfeit or fraudulent. Employers are required to retain the Form I-9 and provide it, upon request, to officers of the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor and the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices for inspection. Employers generally are deemed in compliance with IRCA if they have followed the Form I-9 process, including when an unauthorized alien presents fraudulent documents that appear genuine. Following the passage of IRCA in 1986, employees could present 29 different documents to establish their identity and/or work eligibility. In a 1997 interim rule, the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) reduced the number of acceptable work eligibility documents from 29 to 27. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996 required the former INS and SSA to operate three voluntary pilot programs to test electronic means for employers to verify an employee’s eligibility to work, one of which was the Basic Pilot Program. The Basic Pilot Program was designed to test whether pilot verification procedures could improve the existing employment verification process by reducing (1) false claims of U.S. citizenship and document fraud, (2) discrimination against employees, (3) violations of civil liberties and privacy, and (4) the burden on employers to verify employees’ work eligibility. In 2007, USCIS renamed the Basic Pilot Program the Employment Eligibility Verification program and later in the year changed the name to E-Verify. E-Verify provides participating employers with an electronic method to verify their employees’ work eligibility. Regardless of whether employers participate voluntarily in E-Verify, they are still required to complete Forms I-9 for all newly hired employees in accordance with IRCA. After completing the forms, those employers participating in the program query E-Verify’s automated system by entering employee information provided on the forms, such as name and social security number, into the E-Verify Web site within 3 days of the employee’s start date. The program then electronically matches that information against information in SSA’s Numident database and, if necessary, DHS databases to determine whether the employee is eligible to work. E-Verify electronically notifies employers whether their employees’ work authorization was confirmed. Those queries that the DHS automated check cannot confirm are referred to USCIS staff, called immigration status verifiers, who check employee information against information in other DHS databases. The E-Verify program process is shown in figure 1. In cases when E-Verify cannot confirm an employee’s work authorization status either through the automatic check or the check by an immigration status verifier, the system issues the employer a tentative nonconfirmation of the employee's work authorization status. In this case, the employers must notify the affected employees of the finding, and the employees have the right to contest their tentative nonconfirmations by contacting SSA or USCIS to resolve any inaccuracies in their records within 8 federal working days. During this time, employers may not take any adverse actions against those employees, such as limiting their work assignments or pay. After 8 days, employers are required to either immediately terminate the employment, or notify DHS of the continued employment, of workers who do not successfully contest the tentative nonconfirmation and those whom the program finds are not work-authorized. The E-Verify program uses the same system as USCIS’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program, which provides a variety of verification services for federal, state, and local government agencies. USCIS estimates that more than 150,000 federal, state, and local agency users verify immigration status through the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program. SSA also operates the Web-based Social Security Number Verification Service, which employers can use to assure that employees’ names and social security numbers match SSA’s records. This service, designed to ensure accurate employer wage reporting, is offered free of charge. Employer use is voluntary, and approximately 12,000 employers requested more than 25.7 million verifications in 2005, according to the SSA Office of the Inspector General. USCIS contracted for an independent evaluation of the E-Verify program. Westat, the organization that conducted the evaluation, issued a report on its evaluation findings in September 2007. According to this report, the Westat evaluation examined how well the federal government implemented modifications made to the original Basic Pilot Program and the extent to which the program met its goals to (1) reduce employment of unauthorized workers, (2) reduce discrimination, (3) protect employee civil liberties and privacy, and (4) prevent undue burden on employers. Based on its findings, Westat made recommendations to USCIS and SSA intended to help improve the program. Mandatory electronic employment verification would substantially increase the number of employers using the E-Verify program, which would place greater demands on USCIS and SSA resources. As of April 2008, more than 61,000 employers have registered to use the program, about 28,000 of whom were active users, according to USCIS. USCIS has estimated that approximately 4,000 employers are registering per month. In fiscal year 2007, USCIS processed about 3.2 million employer queries and for the first 6 months of fiscal year 2008, processed about 2.6 million queries. If participation in the E-Verify program were made mandatory, the program would have to accommodate all of the estimated 7.4 million employers in the United States. USCIS has projected that employers would submit an average of 63 million queries on newly hired employees per year under a mandatory E-Verify program. USCIS officials stated that they have tested the capacity of the E-Verify computer system to handle about four times the projected load of queries that would occur if E-Verify participation were made mandatory for all employers. These tests showed that the E-Verify system can process up to 240 million queries per year, with the purchase of 5 additional servers, exceeding USCIS’s projection of an average of 63 million queries per year under a mandatory E-Verify program. USCIS has developed cost and staffing estimates for operating a mandatory E-Verify program. Although DHS has not prepared official cost figures, USCIS officials estimated that a mandatory E-Verify program could cost a total of about $765 million for fiscal years 2009 through 2012 if only newly hired employees are queried through the program and about $838 million over the same 4-year period if both newly hired and current employees are queried. Mandatory implementation of E-Verify would also require additional USCIS staff to administer the program, but USCIS was not yet able to provide estimates for its staffing needs. Under the voluntary program, USCIS operated E-Verify with 12 headquarters staff members in 2005, which has grown to about 121 full-time employees nationwide, with 21 staff members for monitoring and compliance and 11 for status verification operations. According to USCIS, the agency would increase its staffing level based on a formula that considers monitoring and compliance and status verification staffing needs as the number of employers using E-Verify increases. A mandatory E-Verify program would also require an increase in SSA’s resource and staffing requirements. SSA has estimated that implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program would cost a total of about $281 million for fiscal years 2009 through 2013 and require hiring 700 new employees for a total of 2,325 additional workyears over the same 5-year period. According to SSA, these estimates represent costs if the current E-Verify system is expanded, and any changes to the current process could have significant additional costs to the agency. The estimates include costs for start-up, such as system upgrades, training for current SSA employees, and training, space, and workstations for new employees, and ongoing activities, such as field office visits and system maintenance. SSA’s estimates assume that under a mandatory expansion of the current E-Verify program, for every 100 E-Verify queries, about 1.4 individuals will contact SSA regarding a tentative nonconfirmation. According to SSA officials, the cost of mandatory E-Verify would be driven by the increased workload of its field office staff due to resolving SSA tentative nonconfirmations, as well as some of the computer systems improvements and upgrades that SSA would need to implement to address the capacity of a federal mandatory program. Moreover, the final number of new full-time staff required would depend on both the legislative requirements for implementing mandatory E-Verify and the effectiveness of efforts USCIS has underway to decrease the need for individuals to visit SSA field offices. SSA officials told us that SSA would need time and a phased-in approach for implementation of a mandatory E-Verify program in order to handle the increased workload for SSA field offices. In prior work, we reported that secondary verifications lengthen the time needed to complete the employment verification process. The majority of E-Verify queries entered by employers—about 92 percent—confirm the employee is authorized to work within seconds. About 7 percent of queries are not confirmed by the initial automated check and result in SSA tentative nonconfirmations, while about 1 percent result in DHS tentative nonconfirmations.