With the Federal Government placing much more emphasis on prioritizing immigration enforcement efforts, it is critically important for businesses to ensure that their companies are complying with the federal requirements to ensure that their employees are legally authorized to work in the U.S. The risks that are posed to your company by a lack of preparation are far too great for your company to be ill-prepared.

Failure to comply with federal employment verification laws can lead to not only significant business disruptions due to the loss of your company’s workforce, but also several other significant problems for your business, including:

• Significant fines that can reach into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, for knowingly employing unauthorized aliens at your worksite;
• Potential criminal penalties, both in terms of fines, which can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and jail time for business leaders who knowingly employ unauthorized workers;
• Corporate asset seizures, as a conviction may trigger asset or profit forfeiture, and
• Debarment from eligibility for federal contracts.

Below are several proactive steps that businesses should take to ensure that their employees are legally authorized to work in the county.

• Establish Uniform I-9 Compliance System: Your company is legally required to have a properly completed Form I-9 on file for every employee.
• If your company is beginning to establish a uniform I-9 compliance policy, using your payroll records to ensure that your firm has all of required forms on hand is a good place to start.
• Employee Training in this regard is critical. Ensuring that your managers and HR staff know how to properly complete I-9 forms, recognize document issues, and take appropriate action if they suspect an employee may lack proper work authorization, helps prevent problems before they arise.
• Many companies designate an Immigration Compliance Officer to lead these efforts. This can be very helpful with regard to complying with document retention requirements. It can also be helpful if your firm has third-party contracts and that company’s employees spend a significant amount of time on your worksite. Ensuring those individuals are properly classified in your compliance system will be very helpful during a site visit.
• There are many ways that employment relationships are formed and terminated. If your company employs foreign nationals, there are also issues of documents expiring that necessitate that individual’s work authorization be reverified. It is important to create clear policies for onboarding, reverification, and termination, and ensure that those policies are adhered to on every I-9 form.
• Develop Standard Operating Procedures and Guides for Site Visits: In the event representatives from a federal agency come to your worksite (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate), having your conduct mapped out prior to their arrival will help maintain workplace productivity and temper emotions among your workers.
• Your firm should designate certain managers to be the company representatives who will be tasked with communicating with government and, if possible, the company should have an immigration lawyer’s contact information readily available so they can be contacted as the site visit is transpiring.
• Designated company representatives should ask for the officer’s identification and business card to verify the official’s credentials.
• If a notice of inspection, subpoena, or a warrant is provided by the federal officer, the plan should inform the designated representatives to:
• Examine these documents offered by the government,
• Note the precise locations of what is to be inspected,
• Direct the company representative to accompany the officers during their inspection, and
• Document everything that is occurring during the inspection.
• Conduct Regular I-9 Audits: Regularly auditing I-9 forms is key to identifying and remedying any discrepancies. To effectively do this, seeking counsel from an experienced immigration attorney to conduct periodic, thorough audits will help ensure that your records are accurate and up to date. It is important to document all these due diligence efforts your business undertakes, and working with immigration counsel can help you maintain these records. To that end, immigration attorneys can help ensure that if there are any technical mistakes made on any of your employees’ I-9s, they can make the proper corrections
• Run Mock Scenarios: Just like fire drills, conduct simulated audits or raids to train your team to respond calmly and correctly under pressure. In these instances, it is important that every employee at your worksite understands their rights in these situations.
• In the event ICE officers are at your worksite during an inspection, your employees are not required to answer questions or sign any documents. If an employee is to be interviewed as a representative of the employer during an ICE investigation, the employer has the right to have counsel present during questioning. These are topics that your company will want to cover with its workers during these drills.
• Organize All Recordkeeping: Federal agents investigating your worksite will appreciate being able to quickly obtain the documentation that they are looking to inspect. On the contrary, if it takes your company a considerable amount of time to provide the documents they seek, it raises their suspicions that your company may have something to hide.

We hope you find this information helpful to your business.