According to a report just released by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the federal agency did not use the E-Verify program to confirm the identity and employment eligibility of nearly 20 percent of their new hires. While E-Verify is required for all federal workers and federal contractors and subcontractors, this report lends to the idea that E-Verify may not be ready for full implementation at a national level.

Much has been published about concerns about the validity of the E-Verify program and the SSA’s admittance to its own internal conflicts with the system further solidify those earlier concerns. In addition to SSA’s inability to use E-Verify in nearly 20 percent of their new hires, the federal agency also improperly ran verification checks on nearly 170 volunteers and persons not yet hired, actions that were in violation of federal law. In 2008, a survey conducted with workers in Arizona, where mandatory laws requiring the use of E-Verify were active at the time, revealed that just over 33 percent of 376 immigrant workers had been fired due to errors in the E-Verify database and not one of those fired workers were informed that they could have appealed those incorrect findings.