Think that maintaining properly vetted I-9 forms on your employees isn’t that big a deal?

The answer –it is a big deal–has been driven home forcefully to management at Columbia Farms in Columbia, S.C.

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid in 2008 discovered hundreds of illegal immigrants working at the poultry plant, most of the workers were deported, dozens of others were tried and sentenced to jail time for using fake documents, and two of the farms’ managers were criminally charged.

The two managers escaped the noose, so to speak, when the company recently agreed to a $1.5 million plea agreement that will require the accused to undergo training. The company itself, in agreeing to reform its hiring practice to legal standards and enroll in the E-Verify program, also must hire an on-site compliance officer and contract with an external auditing firm to monitor its employment practices.

The I-9 form from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is required of all new hires and is used to verify their legal status to work in the United States through the submission of identifying documents. E-Verify is a voluntary online program that can be used to check people’s records at the Social Security Administration and USCIS to verify their right to work in the states.

In short, the I-9 process is an important one. Fortunately, Personnel Concepts has developed a comprehensive I-9 Compliance Kit to help employers and human resource personnel maintain proper I-9 verifications. It is a big deal.

Declaring it is out "to  target the root cause of illegal immigration," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit are scurrying about to inspect companies’ 1-9 employment verification records to make sure no illegal immigrants are on the payroll.

ICE hit the jackpot recently when it inspected Houston’s IFCO Systems, the nation’s largest manufacturer of pallets. Inspectors found 1,000 employees who were not authorized to work in the U.S., and IFCO was hit with a $20.7 million fine.

This approach is the reversal of the Bush-era ICE methodology when companies were raided and the illegal workers rounded up and sent off for deportation hearings. Now it’s the employers who are being targeted and fined.

“Employment is the primary driving force behind illegal immigration,” a DHS statement said. “By working with employers to ensure a legal workplace, ICE is able to stem the tide of those who cross our borders illegally or unlawfully remain in our country to work.”

The DHS statement said ICE would base upcoming investigations on tips from the public, reports from current and former employees and referrals from other law enforcement agencies. “ICE does not randomly target employers,” the statement said. “All investigations and arrests are based on specific intelligence obtained from a variety of sources.”

Though ICE is not directly raiding workforces, it reaffirmed its commitment to prosecuting and eventually deporting those who are found to be here illegally.

Employers, the rules and form for verifying your employees’ eligibility to work in the United States have both changed. Stay current–and in legal compliance–by picking up a copy of Personnel Concepts’ I-9 Compliance Kit.

News item from the blogosphere:

Earlier this year, Car Care Inc., a subsidiary of Mace Securities Inc., was ordered to pay a fine of $100,000 and to forfeit $500,000 to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following a 2006 investigation. (At one time, Mace, a manufacturer of security and personal defense products, was one of the largest carwash chains in the nation.) Car Care Inc., based in the Northeast, had employees on the payroll who were using false identification cards to show legal status to work. $600,000! On top of that, five managers are awaiting criminal actions against them, personally.

Actually, I found this little tidbit while following a Google Alert on the I-9 employment verification form that employers must keep on file for each employee. The quoted tidbit is both newsworthy and instructional in and of itself, but it’s also part of a blog posting by labor law attorney Jacob Monty.

Monty’s whole point is how much safer and easier an employer’s life becomes when he or she uses the E-Verify online database to check the “legal to work in the U.S.” status of each new employee. The system is free, he says, works in about 10 seconds, and produces a document to file with each employee’s I-9 that virtually guarantees you won’t get fined by the government. Using E-Verify, you’ve done your due diligence, in other words.

The blog where Monty posted this was one for the carwashing and detailing industry, and he blithely warns his readers that car washes are “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to ICE illegal worker raids.

For his final advice, Monty warns, “ICE knows which companies are using the system and which are not—and they target those who are not using E-Verify.”

I personally always rely on Personnel Concepts to keep compliant with the various laws and regulations of the nation, and that long-time labor law compliance company has issued an instructive and useful I-9 Compliance Kit. Highly recommended.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is a $2.6-billion-a-year agency. It is also the paper-jammed and -backlogged agency formerly known as the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).

Ask anybody who’s dealt with the agency in either incarnation and you’ll hear horror stories of standing in blocks-long lines before dawn and spending the whole day waiting for your name to be called. Then a year or two later, you might hear something–if you’re lucky.

Someone caught on to the nightmare known as the INS in 1999 and began a modernization process, but they forgot to fund it. Then came 9/11, then the merger into DHS, and then more lack of funds.

Finally, late in 2008 IBM was chosen to take the whole process online in a $500-million, long-overdue project. Considering that it costs the USCIS $100 million a year just to ship and store the huge files it creates for each immigrant, it seems that they coulda and shoulda found the $500 million many long years ago. In five years of operation or so, the computerization will pay for itself.

The goal is to process each applicant in six months’ time, down from the 18 months to three years that it typically takes, using electronic applications and database filing.

The new system will allow government agencies, from the Border Patrol to the FBI to the Labor Department, to access immigration records faster and more accurately. In combination with initiatives to link digital fingerprint scans to unique identification numbers, it would create a lifelong digital record for applicants. It also would eliminate the need for time- and labor-intensive filing and refiling of paper forms, which are stored at 200 locations in 70 million manila file folders. (Big Brother has finally arrived!)

To its credit, the USCIS did manage to put its appointments system online a few years back (for another cool $500 mil), and those lines that snaked around several city blocks have now been reduced. Queues still exist, but people show up at appointed times rather than lining up for a limited number of seats each morning. That part is now more manageable, but the processing time is still far too lengthy.

The whole system is so dysfunctional that immigrants who get tired of the wait (or whose documents are simply lost or misplaced, rendering them a non-person) can turn to the court of last resort called (funnily) OIL, Office of Immigrant Litigation, which employs 250 lawyers and costs the government another $20 or more million a year to operate.