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Government Drops No Match Defense

08:09 H | Topics: Controversia - Immigration - Justice - Politics

The Department of Homeland Security is backing off its No Match program that was challenged in a San Francisco Federal lawsuit.

The rule, part of the Bush war on illegal immigration, would have forced employers to fire workers within 90 days if their Social Security information could not be verified or face potential prosecution for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

Specifically, the rule said that if employers received a “no-match” letter – a notice issued by the Social Security Administration (SSA) that the identity information submitted by the employer for a worker does not match the agency’s own records – then the employer must either resolve the discrepancy within 90 days or fire the employee. The thinking was that such a measure would catch undocumented workers that purchase false Social Security numbers in order to gain employment.

The problems with this plan were many, but one of the biggest problems was the impact it wpuld have had on workers with legitimate Social Security numbers.

An AFL-CIO press release reveals that the Office of the Inspector General of SSA has discovered that 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in the database – more than 70% – belong to native-born U.S. citizens.

These mistakes can be due to something as simple as clerical errors or name changes after a marriage or divorce. By the Social Security Administrations own recording, prior to an injunction brought upon by the lawsuit, it was prepared to mail out 141,000 no-match letters that covered over eight million workers. Imagine having only 90 days to deal with all that. It would be something that the S.S. Administration would likely not be able to handle and would likely lead to millions being unemployed as a result.

Via / TPM Cafe

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