Will E-Verify Become a National ID System?

Last month I blogged that the ObamaCare data hub would make individual privacy an artifact of the past. The immigration bill that’s making its way through Congress contains an equally scary provision that essentially gives the federal government the power to determine if you and I can be employed. It’s called E-Verify. Incredibly, it has bipartisan support.

Here’s how it works.

E-Verify is an Internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security. Its purpose is to verify that every person seeking employment in the US is “eligible” – i.e. approved by the federal government to be employed. The program is currently deployed in pilot programs between 16 state governments and the federal government.

When you apply for employment you must complete an I-9 form and furnish personal information (name, DOB, Social Security Number, and verification of your citizenship or immigration status) for E-Verify to process. Processing involves comparing the information you furnish with the information in databases maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Social Security Administration (SSA). If all of the information matches, E-Verify notifies the employer that you are eligible to work. A future feature of the system will furnish the employer a digital image of the applicant, as is now done for passports, which the employer must confirm matches the job applicant.

If the information doesn’t match for any reason – for example, maybe the applicant’s immigration status doesn’t allow working in the US or perhaps there is an error in the government’s record – the employer is sent a “Tentative Non-confirmation” (TNC) and the applicant has eight working days to contact DHS and/or SSA and sort out the problem. If the problem isn’t resolved in eight days, E-Verify sends a “Final Non-confirmation” notice to the employer, who is required by law to fire the employee.

Why not hold off hiring the person, you ask, until eligibility is received from E-Verify? Because, we are told, E-Verify is not to be used until someone is hired – i.e. it’s not for screening candidates we might hire. The employer must therefore incur the onboarding process and expense in order to lawfully use E-Verify.

The purpose of the E-Verify program is to prevent illegals from obtaining employment. The method of the E-Verify program is to require that everyone in the US to obtain permission from the government before being employed. Everyone – you and I – must prove we are who we say we are before we can earn a living. Theoretically, the entire American workforce – estimated currently to be between 130 million and 150 million – must go through the verification process in order to prevent an estimated eight million illegals from getting jobs (mostly low wage, labor-intensive work).

Proponents of E-Verify argue, hey, you have to put up with a certain amount of hassle in order to get a driver’s license and auto tag, comply with the TSA to board a plane, obtain a building permit; what’s the beef? The beef is I don’t have to drive a car, travel by air, or make an addition to my house – but I do have to make a living. Whoever controls my right to make a living has a lot of control over my life.

“But it takes only minutes,” supporters insist. Yep. Minutes. When it works. When it doesn’t work, whose problem is it? Well, it’s not the employer’s or the government’s problem. It’s mine. And I’ve got eight days to sort it out with a faceless bureaucracy.

Show me one thing that the “expertise” of an unaccountable government bureaucracy made better by its involvement. Schools? The Post Office? Amtrak? Anything? A national employment verification system has been the holy grail of employment managers for years. The E-Verify in the 16-state pilot has been in trial use for over a decade. You’d expect that if credit card issuers can monitor credit card use and spot fraudulent activity, that E-Verify would have some sort of fraud profile to spot identity theft. Yet of the 3.5 million transactions entered over the three year period ending March 2007, approximately 744,000 transactions – 21% – were Social Security numbers used multiple times. That means people using the same name and Social Security number were concurrently working at multiple locations.

Ironically E-Verify can’t do what it was designed to do: i.e. deny work to illegal aliens.

The most recently available audit of accuracy found 54% false positives – that is, people who were verified as eligible to work weren’t legally in this country.

Determining false negatives – people rejected who should have been approved – is a bit tricky because a person can be rejected because of illegally being in the US or being legally in the US but having an error in the person’s database record. Muzaffar Chishti, who is with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, says the E-Verify error rate, once between eight and ten percent, has “improved” to two percent. Sounds small, but it’s almost three million of the present workforce. True, the entire workforce does not change jobs every year, but an average of 13% do and that’s almost 400,000 who are wrongly denied employment. How would you like to be one of them and spend several months sorting out an error in the system?

Consider the case of Jessica St. Pierre, the daughter of Haitian and Bahaman immigrants. She was born in Florida. When she went to work for a telephone company, E-Verify rejected her as an unauthorized worker. She went to her local Social Security office to find the error and was given a print-out showing that her records were correct. She showed the print-out to the employer, but her information still couldn’t process her through E-Verify. She contacted other government agencies, even the E-Verify Hotline, and no one could find an error in her database record. She was fired as required by law and was out of work for three months. With the help of the National Immigration Law Center, the error was finally found. The telephone company had entered her name into the system without a period after the “St.” and it wouldn’t match in E-Verify. The telephone company wouldn’t give back her job and she had to take a job making $2 per hour less.

Yep. Only takes minutes. When it works.

As I mentioned in last month’s blog on ObamaCare’s data hub, consolidated data is an identity thief’s dream come true. Hackers from around the world employ the latest technology to access databases that aggregate millions of records. And when/if E-Verify becomes mandatory, it will be a prime target for hackers because there – in one place – is someone’s phone and Social Security number, email address, work history (since E-Verify must be used with each job change), and photos (if the plan to add state driver license data succeeds.)

If a photo or driver license data requirement is added to the E-Verify system, we will have the essential elements for a national identification structure on every working and retired person, even though the E-Verify provision of the immigration bill forbids a national ID card. It won’t be called a national ID system but it will have all of the necessary functionality to be one. Missions always creep. Don’t forget that the Social Security card began as an account number. For years Social Security cards were imprinted with "Not for Identification Purposes." That restriction was removed in the 1980s. Today it’s impossible to function in society without a Social Security account number as our unique identifier. E-Verify will be a more robust identifier than a Social Security number.

One would hope that recent abuses by IRS, FBI, and NSA would persuade citizens that if there’s a way for government to misuse its power, ultimately it will. The Social Security account number was expanded well beyond its original purpose, despite a congressional ban when Social Security was launched. E-Verify will be expanded beyond its intended purpose. The potential usefulness of E-Verify as an all-purpose ID check will be too irresistible. Politicians always push the envelope.

The opportunities for abuse in this program are staggering. If driver’s license information is added to E-Verify, why not add a person’s driving record – traffic tickets and DUI? How about adding criminal background? Travel history? Instead of using a driver’s license to prove identity, why not the convenience of E-Verify? Incidentally, what was the transaction associated with that E-Verify check? That should go in your database record too. Then the government would know everything you buy.

Do we have an illegal immigration problem? Sure we do. Even though immigrants take jobs most American citizens won’t perform, if we have laws we ought to enforce them. The solution must include the illegal cross-border traffic. I remain unpersuaded that duplicating Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China at a cost of $4 million per mile for 2,000 miles is the right solution when we have the ability to read a license tag from a spy satellite.

But this blog isn’t about the immigration debate. It’s about freedom and privacy and their gradual erosion by a central government that is growing too powerful. If the solution to the immigration problem is less freedom and less privacy, it’s too expensive. We have to find a different solution.

E-Verify is another government meat-axe solution: “Better to let the innocent suffer than the guilty escape.” In order to prevent eight million illegals from working, 150 million have to comply with rules intended for those eight million. If either the government or employer makes a mistake in data entry, it’s the employee’s problem to straighten it out.

We’ve seen the meat-axe approach before. The Transportation Security Administration puts every person through the hassle of having to arrive early to allow time for security delays. No one is exempt from the intrusive groping including the ridiculous searching of crying children and blue-haired grammas. But to avoid “profiling” and in the name of political correctness, let’s not focus on the travelers who any intelligent person would suspect.

ObamaCare is another meat-axe government solution. It will destroy a healthcare system that worked for 270 million people because 40 million were uninsured. I didn’t say 40 million were denied healthcare. Everyone had access to healthcare even if it was delivered in a hospital emergency department. But remove from the 40 million those who are temporarily uninsured because they are between jobs or unemployed for less than 12 months. And remove those who are voluntarily uninsured because they are young and healthy and money spent on insurance could buy a flat screen TV. Remove those two groups and there are only 10 million truly uninsured. We could have found a more cost effective way to care for those ten million. But the meat-axe won out.

Procedures are required for citizens to leave or reenter the country. These procedures not only give the government knowledge of our comings and goings, but also potentially put government in the position to prevent our travel. Has government used that power? Not yet.

We can’t withdraw large sums of our cash from our bank accounts without government knowledge. There are limits on the amount of cash we can take out of the country. The government gets involved when we open a bank account, take out a loan, and are issued a credit card.

E-Verify is another step toward greater government control of every aspect of our lives.

Obama’s New Data Hub

And we thought things couldn’t get worse after the cover on the IRS abuses was blown and the scope of NSA snooping on Americans was revealed. As details about the ObamaCare data hub leak out, our constitutional Fourth Amendment protection is fading faster than a post-election promise.

This is what happens when 2,700-page bills are passed that none of the elected officials have the time or interest to read before voting on it. Since no Republican in either house voted for ObamaCare, I’m talking about Democrats, of course, whose air-headed leader in the House of Representatives famously said, “… we have to pass the [healthcare] bill so that you can find out what’s in it....”

Well, we’re finding what’s in it.

The fulcrum of ObamaCare is its 50 insurance exchanges – one in each state. Among other functions, the exchanges collect data and information required to administer ObamaCare. The agency that enforces compliance is the IRS, renowned for its citizen abuse skills. The Chief Knee-cracker for ObamaCare enforcement is Sarah Hall Ingram, who was in charge of the IRS office at the center of the Tea Party targeting scandal and gave her the experience for this assignment. If Sarah Hall Ingram were Thelma, Louise would be Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was given absolute control in the law to implement the aim of ObamaCare by whatever means she chose.

The means she chose include the ObamaCare data hub – the Mother of All Databases – a technology achievement never before attempted on this scale.

The data hub will connect (hold on to your britches) the HHS (entitlement qualification and medical records) with the Social Security Administration (your unique identifier number), the IRS (your income, and employment status), the Department of Homeland Security, (your citizenship and international travel information), Department of Justice (your criminal history), the Veterans Administration (military service information), Office of Personnel Management (information on government employees), the Department of Defense (unit and deployment history), and the Peace Corps (domestic and foreign service assignments.) Plus the hub will tap into state databases to confirm residency and Medicaid criteria. Everyone will be required by law or regulation to report changes in marital status, changes in income, hours worked, changes in employer, moves to a new state, a change in insurance plans, and changes in your criminal history. You can see a schematic here of Obama’s tentacular intrusiveness which his data hub represents.

Think of the hub as a busy four-way intersection through which all traffic must flow to get anywhere and a record is kept of everyone and everything that passes through it.

In a column in USA Today, University of Minnesota professor and Manhattan Institute scholar Stephen T. Parente said “The federal government is planning to quietly enact what could be the largest consolidation of personal data in the history of the republic … when the constantly updated information is combined in a central data hub, the potential for abuse is staggering.”

Edward Snowden showed us how much confidence we should have in the federal government’s ability to keep confidential information confidential. Last year a hacker accessed 3.6 million data base records in South Carolina with Social Security numbers and bank account data. 

A recent Government Accountability Office audit said weaknesses in IRS security systems "continue to jeopardize the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the financial and sensitive taxpayer information." Another audit discovered that the IRS unintentionally exposed confidential information on thousands of taxpayers in 2009 and 2010. The next year the Social Security Administration did the same thing on a larger scale.

But what do you expect from a government that can’t competently run a postal service or Amtrak profitably? The consolidation of all this data will make it the most attractive hacker target in the world. If the feds can’t prevent inadvertent data releases from independent agency servers, does anyone really believe they can safeguard this data base?

Willie Sutton said the reason he robbed banks was because that was where the money was kept. A hub/database like the one Obama and Sebelius are creating is like Willie Sutton’s banks. Why would thieves look anywhere other than the ObamaCare data hub to steal identities, commit credit fraud, or know if you have assets worth stealing. With only one place to look and a “winner take all” payoff, thieves may team up and work together. Computer hacking technology should become a growth industry.

After failing to master the expertise to run the postal service and a railroad, the government is now going to reform healthcare, bring down costs, and collect a ton of information in the process. Assuming the data could be kept safe from thieves – which I wouldn’t assume for a heartbeat – what’s to keep it from being abused by the government?

Us??? Not us? (wink, wink.) “Mr. Throckmorton, I see from our computer records that you’ve voted Republican in the last seven elections. Our experts have denied your life-saving operation at this time. Please check back with us after the next election.” (Of course, it cuts both ways. The Republicans will regain the White House at some point and may also have control of both houses of Congress.)

Memo to those who believe abuse won’t happen: Did you read about Sebelius soliciting “contributions” from the industry she regulates … money which would be turned over to ObamaCare supporters to drum up support for the unpopular law and encourage people to participate in the exchanges? Do you remember the Obama and Sebelius goons inviting citizens to report their fellow citizens who hated ObamaCare? “If you get an email or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov,” they urged. Only ideologues who deny First Amendment protection would call for citizens to do such a thing.

In combination with data collected by NSA spying what would not be known about American lives?

Not to worry, says the Obama administration. “The hub will not store consumer information, but will securely transmit data between state and federal systems to verify consumer application information,” or so it claims in an online fact sheet. The Center for Consumer Information & Insurance Oversight at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services says hey, no sweat. The information we collect will not be stored, and privacy is the “highest priority.”

But a regulatory notice that Obama’s boys and girls filed early this year tells a different story.

That filing describes a new "system of records" that will store names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, taxpayer status, gender, ethnicity, email addresses, telephone numbers on the millions of people expected to apply for coverage at the ObamaCare exchanges, as well as "tax return information from the IRS, income information from the Social Security Administration, and financial information from other third-party sources." Data from businesses that buy insurance on an exchange, including a "list of qualified employees and their tax ID numbers," will be kept on file for 10 years. That’s a lot of information not to collect and not store.

Check out the online filing certificate and you’ll see the federal government can disclose any information it collects "without the consent of the individual" to almost anyone – "agency contractors, consultants, or grantees" who "need to have access to the records" to help run ObamaCare, as well as law enforcement officials to "investigate potential fraud." Who did they leave out?

Republican lawmakers have asked Kathleen Sebelius how HHS and other sources of data will protect sensitive information but she hasn’t gotten back to them with an answer. She’s really busy, you know.

I’ve often said the worst idea that government ever conceived was the central sewage system. When property owners had to get rid of their waste relying on a septic tank the size of an automobile, waste disposal was a manageable problem. When some bright guy said, “Hey, let’s consolidate all of this into a central sewage system,” you now had a big disposal mess – preprocessing, sedimentation ponds, effluent disposal, and on, and on – all caused by consolidation.

One thing leads to another in most things. In order for ObamaCare to function it requires an invasion of privacy on a grand scale that would not be needed if there were no ObamaCare. The data hub became necessary to enable agency computers to “talk” to each other – something that’s never been attempted. Collecting the data puts it at risk for exposure, if not theft. Storing the data makes it attractive to every hacker in the galaxy.  None of this would have been necessary without ObamaCare. All of this is headed toward a disaster. Even the author of ObamaCare, Max Baucus (D-MT) says it’s a train wreck waiting to happen. And when it happens, it will be like the walls on a sewage retention pond collapsing and data will run everywhere.

Representative Diane Black (R-TN), a member of the House Oversight Committee complained that ObamaCare isn’t close to being at a point that allows it to be implemented. She is the author of H.R. 2022, Stopping Government Abuse of Taxpayer Information Act, which halts the implementation of ObamaCare until all government agencies with access to the Federal Data Services Hub certify under penalty of perjury that taxpayer information will not be used to target individuals based on their beliefs.

Black’s bill might get out of committee. It might even be brought to the floor of the House for a full vote. But it has no chance in the Senate. If it did, Obama wouldn’t sign it. Her effort is symbolic and isn’t likely to draw a lot of attention.

Max Baucus paid for his perfidy by leaving the Senate. He’s in a tough race in Montana and his authorship of ObamaCare has cost him with voters.

Last week, Obama announced the delay of the ObamaCare mandate until 2015. In one sense, this was an admission that the vast apparatus needed wasn’t in place – which was helped when 30 Republican governors refused to set up exchanges This has set the stage for legal challenges regarding what Obama can do to create the exchanges and disburse subsidies.

In a larger sense, Obama made a shrewd political move. With the 2014 mid-year elections heating up, the last thing the Democrats want is for voters to experience what was in store for them had ObamaCare been allowed to proceed during an election year. They hope there is an outside chance Democrats could win back the House, giving Obama free rein to run amok the last two years of his administration. It’s more likely that the Republicans will retain the House and an outside chance of taking the Senate. Even gaining seats would slow down Harry Reid’s Senate agenda.

The execution is delayed, not pardoned. Those full time employees whose hours would have been cut to avoid ObamaCare – about 3.2 million – get a reprieve. Good news for fast food and theater employees. Small companies that would have been forced into layoffs to escape the 50-employee cutoff for ObamaCare compliance can delay for a year. ObamaCare would have hurt the economic recovery. Now that’s it’s delayed, the economy may improve and Obama can beat his breast and crow that his policies are working.

So far, it seems like Obama wins by delaying implementation. But unless Republicans are catatonic, which I often think they are, they might want to insist that the law move forward – unless, of course, they want to cede both the executive and legislative functions to the White House and go home. The law, which John Roberts so cleverly kept resuscitating, states that the employer mandate penalties under IRC Section 4980H “shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” Unless that’s repealed, it must be enforced.

Last time I checked, the President can’t repeal laws, and he can’t enforce the ones he likes and delay others if that serves his needs.