Business leaders are saying that a new immigration reform bill in now in Congress could present a major bureaucratic and technological bottleneck for employers forced to use a verification system still under development to determine the legal status of workers. Under the proposed bill, employers would have to run Social Security numbers and other identification through the Electronic Employer Verification System for all new hires within 18 months and all other employees with the first three years of passage. Critics question whether the system is reliable enough the 7 to 8 million employers that would need to be signed up by the Department of Homeland Security, and argue the resulting overload could cause "false negative" results.
See "Employers protest worker screening", Suzanne Gamboa, Mail Tribune, May 30, 2007