labor lawAdivision of labor law center

A combination of efforts by President Obama’s administration and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), backed by the courts, has extended the deadline for implementation of new E-Verify regulations for federal contractors.

 

The original deadline was January 1, 2009. That has been delayed until May 21, 2009. As a result, federal contracts will have several additional weeks in which to comply with E-Verify.

 

Starting on May 21, any companies that enter into contracts with the federal government will be mandated to use E-Verify in order to double-check the immigration and legal work status of new employers.

 

A confluence of events led to the delay. For one, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, had sent memos to all federal agencies urging them to delay the effective dates of regulations pushed through during the final days of the Bush Administration.

 

The SHRM and other business organizations joined forces to challenge the new regulation in the courts.

 

In turn, the Office of Management and Budget extended the deadline. The Department of Justice concurred on the delay. The final step will be a review by a federal district court judge in Maryland, but it is expected that the extension will receive this final approval.

 

Anyone wishing to view the complete E-Verify documents on compliance is invited to go to www.laborlawcenter.com.

 

The SHRM’s director of government affairs, Mike Aitken, expressed the organizations hope that the delay essentially “signals an interest, on the part of the government, to re-evaluate the rule.”  Aitken said SHRM was concerned that by issuing the regulation “the government exceeded its authority” when it mandated that federal contractors use a program that was originally designed as a voluntary pilot project. The SHRM, he said, was also concerned that the government was “mandating the re-verification of existing employees, currently not allowed under the E-Verify requirements.”

 

Jointly developed by the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, and Social Security, E-Verify feeds an employee’s social security number and other information into an online system. The system in turn checks the identifying information against federal records.

 

There are several states that have already required employers to make use of E-Verify.

 

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