Sponsors (41)
Introduced January 9, 2025 by Ken Calvert · Last progress January 9, 2025
The bill aims to create a faster, more auditable nationwide employment‑verification system with new protections for SSN victims and stronger enforcement, but does so by expanding data use, regulatory discretion, penalties, and compliance costs—raising significant privacy, employment‑disruption, and burden risks for immigrants, workers, and small employers while increasing federal costs.
Employers and hiring entities nationwide will get faster, automated verification responses (confirmation codes) and pilot-tested identity checks that can speed onboarding and reduce manual I-9 processing delays.
Individuals (including victims of identity theft and parents of minors) can block or suspend SSN use in the verification system and benefit from safeguards and secondary verification procedures, reducing fraudulent hires and protecting earnings/identity records.
The bill provides guaranteed advance funding, required audits, mandated logging, and reporting to strengthen oversight, transparency, and accountability of SSA/DHS verification operations.
Millions of workers—especially immigrants—face greater risk of job delays, disrupted employment, or wrongful non‑hiring/termination from automated tentative nonconfirmations and mandatory reverification requirements that can take days to resolve.
Expanded data uses, logging, pilot technologies, greater data-sharing (including nongovernmental designees), and new SSN‑suspension workflows increase privacy and security risks for workers whose sensitive identity information is handled or shared.
Employers—particularly small businesses, staffing agencies, and hiring halls—will face substantial new administrative burdens, training, recordkeeping, technology adoption costs, and potential operational disruption to comply with verification, photo-matching, and audit requirements.
Based on analysis of 14 sections of legislative text.
Overhauls federal employment-eligibility verification: expands and funds a DHS-run electronic system, tightens employer verification and penalties, adds identity-protection features, and pilots identity-authentication tech.
Makes major changes to how employers verify work authorization by expanding and reworking the federal electronic employment-eligibility verification system, shifting costs for certain Social Security Administration (SSA) duties to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), strengthening employer verification and penalty rules, and creating identity-protection and identity-authentication pilot programs. It also requires SSA audits to detect misuse of Social Security numbers, authorizes state-limited enforcement under federal rules, and increases civil penalties and debarment authority for repeat violators.