If you consider yourself a competent employer/recruiter (as you should), then you should know the deal about E-verify. It is a free service provided by the Department of Homeland Security that allows you to electronically verify the employment eligibility of all your newly hired employees. The process is very simple. Employers enter their employees’ identification information and documents, and that information is checked against Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration databases. Although the process is mostly voluntary (some states such as Mississippi require it), it would be foolish not to go through with it since it essentially decreases your own liability should it ever come to light that one of your employees submitted false documents. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) provides a very helpful E-verify resource here. For your convenience, the HRM Direct team has gone through the online research and found the most important points regarding E-Verify and you.
1. E-Verify is NOT a pre-screening tool
The law specifically states that you can not use E-verify to screen job candidates before you hire them. The government recently released a new law that allows job candidates to self-check their employment status before applying to your job, but you can not check the verify the employment status of any employee until you actually hire them.
2. If you use E-Verify, you must use it on ALL new hires
Legislation on E-Verify is designed to be as nondiscriminatory as possible. As such, the law stipulates that if you choose to use E-Verify, you must use it on every single new employee that you hire.
3. A Tentative Non-Confirmation (TNC) is NOT grounds to fire an employee
When an employee’s information is entered into E-verify, you will receive an “Employment Authorized” 96.5% of the time. However, on the rare occasion that an employee’s information does not get checked out immediately, you will receive a Tentative Non-Confirmation (TNC). A TNC does not mean that an employee is not legal to work, rather that the database wasn’t able to immediately find a match on the submitted documents. If this happens, you must go over the TNC notice with your employee and discuss the employee’s options. Your employee can either fix the mismatch, contest the TNC or choose to do nothing. What happens next is that the mismatch will be resolved and the TNC waived, or your employee will receive a final nonconfirmation, at which point you must terminate said employee.
Only a final non confirmation is grounds for employee termination, however. Any employee that receives a TNC is still eligible to work and can not be fired for having a TNC.
E-Verify is the government’s way of giving employers a free I-9 spell check. It won’t help you fix careless mistakes in filling out the form as we discuss here, but it addresses the issue of making sure that your employees’ have adequate legal documentation to work for you. Use it and rest easy knowing that even if you were fooled by a false employment document, so was the government.
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