The New Form I-9: Know Who You’re Hiring

Clearly, immigration policy and the legal status of foreign workers in the United States is one of the hot-button issues in next year’s presidential election. For employers, however, the renewed emphasis on verifying employee eligibility will have a significant impact next week. Effective December 26, 2007, all employers (and that includes you) are required to use the revised Employment Eligibility Verification form—Form I-9—when hiring new employees; failure to do so can result in significant problems, including monetary penalties.

The revised Form I-9 was introduced on November 7, 2007, by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. Following a thirty-day transition period, all employers must begin using the revised Form I-9 no later than December 26, 2007.

The purpose of the Form I-9 is to document that a newly hired employee (whether a citizen or non-citizen) is authorized to work in the United States. The Form I-9 process requires employers to collect information from all new employees to verify such authorization. Authority for collecting this information comes from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which makes it unlawful to hire, or continue to employ, an individual whom the employer knows is not authorized to work in the United States.

Since the enactment of the IRCA in 1986, employers have been required to complete a Form I-9 for all employees. The Form I-9 process remained basically unchanged until 1996, when the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act reduced the number of documents that an employer may accept from a newly hired employee to establish employment authorization.

The express purpose of limiting which documents are acceptable was to weed out those that were most susceptible to counterfeiting, tampering, and fraud. However, despite the authorization to revise over 10 years ago, the Form I-9 was never updated to reflect the mandated changes—until now.

Click HERE to download the new version.

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