The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has just published a notice in the Federal Record in which it rescind previous amendments related to how employers should respond when they receive no match letters. This recent notice calls for rescinding the August 2007 No-Match Rule and the 2008 Supplemental Final Rule.
The original 2007 rule described the obligations employers had when they received no-match letters from the Social Security Administration (SSA) or a letter regarding employment verification from DHS. These letters are sent when an employee’s stated Social Security number does not match the numbers in the SSA’s existing database. In addition the 2007 rule provided ‘Safe Harbors,’ rules employers could follow that would establish that the employer did not have knowledge that the employee in question was an unauthorized alien. If an employer is shown to have knowledge of an employee’s unauthorized status, that employer can be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
The current notice comes as DHS now believes they have created substantial improvements in E-Verify program (the electronic employment verification system) and other federal programs to provide the resources employers need to reduce instances of unauthorized employment. DHS believes that a better use of resources would be to focus efforts on enforcement and community outreach to “increase compliance through improved verification, including increased participation in the USCIS’s E-Verify employment eligibility verification system, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s ICE Mutual Agreement Between Government and Employers (IMAGE), and other programs.”
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