U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services is readying a website that would allow individuals to check their eligibility for employment inside the United States.

The Self Check site will query e-Verify and allow workers to enter data "to ensure that the information relating to their eligibility to work is correct and accurate," states an announcement published Oct. 1. in the Federal Register

Workers will spend an estimated 429,352 hours each year with the website, USCIS estimates. The e-Verify database was created by a 1996 law; a December 2009 report commissioned by the Homeland Security Department found that the system is 32 times more likely to inaccurately flag naturalized citizens as ineligible for work than to flag U.S.-born citizens. Only .1 percent of U.S.-born citizens were erroneously flagged during the report's study period of April through June 2008, while 3.2 percent of naturalized citizens were.

Some workers reported spending more than $50 to resolve an inaccurate finding from e-Verify.

The report also found that e-Verify did not detect the illegal status of approximately 54 percent of workers checked through e-Verify. The report said the finding is unsurprising, since many illegal workers resort to identity fraud undetectable by e-Verify.

For more:
- read the Federal Register notice
- download the December 2009 independent evaluation of E-Verify (.pdf)

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