Final E-Verify rule kinder to small businesses

Federal acquisition councils have modified a requirement that contractors check their employees' working status through an online database to ease the burden on small businesses and allow more time for compliance.

Comment on this article in The Forum.Under a final rule published in the Federal Register on Friday, companies only will need to insert a clause requiring vetting through the E-Verify system for prime contracts worth more than $100,000. The threshold proposed in the original draft rule released in June was $3,000.

The rule also extends several deadlines. For instance, contractors participating in E-Verify for the first time also will have 90 calendar days from enrollment, rather than the 30 days granted in the initial proposal, to start using the system for new and existing employees.

The changes came after consideration of more than 1,600 comments on the draft rule. In addition to helping out small firms, the changes "provide contractors with flexible means of complying with the basic requirement that all persons working on federal contracts be electronically verified," said a statement from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security Department agency that runs the database.

The rule, which takes effect on Jan. 15, will require vetting clauses to be inserted into most future contracts that exceed the threshold, with exceptions for purchases of commercially available off-the-shelf products.

E-Verify has been a source of controversy since the Bush administration announced earlier this year that the program would become mandatory for federal contractors. Critics have argued that participation in the program, which is optional for private sector employers, can be costly, and that information in the database is unreliable. An inspector general report released earlier this year found the error rate for the database was more than 4 percent. DHS officials have since said the glitches have been fixed and the error rate has been reduced to 0.5 percent.

"This is a program that has had enormous problems since its launch in 1996," said Timothy Sparapani, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union."Till three years ago, only 3,000 employers [out of] 7.3 million total employers were using it. The reason is because they hated the system; it didn't work."

Sparapani added that the ACLU was looking at every option to resist what he referred to as the Bush administration's attempt to turn a voluntary program into a mandatory one with "a stroke of the pen," and said that he is hoping for support from President-elect Obama and Congress.