Summary: More than 12 years after the Immigration Reform and Control Act created an employment verification process to prevent employers from hiring illegal aliens, significant numbers of unauthorized workers are still obtaining jobs. The widespread use of fraudulent documents by unauthorized workers has undermined the effectiveness of the current verification process, which relies on identity and employment eligibility documents that applicants must show employers when applying for jobs. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has undertaken several initiatives to improve the employment verification process to make it less vulnerable to fraud, but significant obstacles remain. First, INS has started to test three pilot programs in which employers electronically verify an employee's eligibility to work. However, employers' participation in the pilot programs has been significantly less than expected. Second, INS has made little progress in reducing the number of documents that employers can accept to determine employment eligibility. Since 1994, INS has devoted about two percent of its enforcement workyears to its worksite enforcement program, which is designed to detect noncompliance with the law. INS completed about 6,500 investigations of employers in 1998--about three percent of the U.S. employers believed to have unauthorized workers on their payrolls. INS' worksite enforcement program has infrequently imposed sanctions on employers. More than eight out of 10 investigations completed during the period GAO reviewed did not result in a penalty. INS is now changing its approach to worksite enforcement, but it is too soon to know how these changes will be implemented or to assess their impact on the hiring of unauthorized workers.
