Swift officials complained about Basic Pilot four months ago

The only check-and-balance more than 12,000 employers nationwide use to verify the legal status of employees is taking a beating, but it's nothing new.

Four months ago, Swift & Co. officials complained the Basic Pilot online system, which cross-checks employees' Social Security numbers and birth dates with other information through the Department of Homeland Security, wasn't working.

The program provides almost instantaneous results to verify an employee's documentation rather than the monthly results from the Social Security Administration. The voluntary program, however, couldn't catch the identity theft ring that resulted in the arrests of 261 employees this week in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid of Swift meat packing plants in Greeley and 2,000 others across the country.

While company spokesman Sean McHugh touted the program last week as the company's stopgap that showed Swift was "going above and beyond requirements of determining worker authorization," the company lobbied a congressional committee in September to change the program because it couldn't catch the sophisticated rings of identity theft going on now.

"This program, along with increased employer sophistication in processing identity documents, was reasonably effective in helping to eliminate the use of counterfeit paperwork," Jack Shandley, Swift's vice president of Human Relations told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce when it came to Loveland Sept. 1. "However, over time, weaknesses in the Basic Pilot program came to light. As currently structured, the Basic Pilot program cannot detect duplicate active records in its database."

That is to say that the system as designed cannot red-flag multiple uses of Social Security numbers, the crux of everyone's identity.

This fall, however, the company had some idea about more than 400 employees, regardless of the Basic Pilot program.

"There was a period of time this fall where the company itself conducted interviews of suspect employees," said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in a Wednesday press conference about the ICE raids.

He said that more than 400 employees were terminated, quit or did not show up for work as a result of the interviews. The company, however, did not tell Homeland Security about those employees, who are likely still running around with stolen identities.

Identify theft is a problem that's growing, said Chuck Douglas, an owner of H4B Inc., a Denver-area company that markets its services to ensure an employees' legal rights to work by checking for multiple uses of Social Security numbers. Douglas developed his own system to comply with Colorado's new employment verification law that becomes effective in January.

"An extremely high percentage of Social Security numbers are appearing to be multiple users these days," Douglas said. "My best guess at this point is that you're looking at a good 30 percent of Social Security numbers that are attached to multiple users. We're seeing a lot of activity in that area. ... It's just become a geometric growth pattern in the last 10 years."

Basic Pilot has been in use since 1997 and is now housed under the Department of Homeland Security. It's been touted as one of the best ways to catch fraudulent documentation, but it is failing in catching the more sophisticated fraud seen at Swift. Basically, it's a case of the criminals beating the system by stealing genuine documentation.

"What you have to realize is you're talking about very complex forms of fraud, where an individual completely assumes another's identity," said Chris Bentley, spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services division of DHS. "What Basic Pilot does extremely well is (catching) someone trying to pass a phony document as their own. In the vast majority of instances, Basic Pilot is not only a great tool, it is the only tool. But it's not designed to handle these complex schemes."

Further complicating the matter is that current law prohibits the Social Security Administration from sharing information with Homeland Security on instances of multiple use, Chertoff said Wednesday. He called on Congress to change that system this upcoming session.

But the Basic Pilot program may get better by summer with $110 million in planned enhancements, Bentley said.

"This year, the Basic Pilot program received a significant infusion of money in the president's budget which will allow us to add photographs, data mining of potential work-site fraud and employer misuse and do more outreach," Bentley said.

He said there wasn't an actual timeline for system upgrades to be made, but the fiscal 2007 year ends next summer.

For Douglas, whose company began with background investigations for business clients, the federal program is still rather faulty.

"I think the public needs to be very aware of the fact that what's available to people like Swift or the county Social Services at the federal level is falling way short," he said. "It's not meeting their needs or their requirements."

Swift suggestions

Swift & Co., vice president of Human Relations Jack Shandley testified before a congressional committee in September in Loveland to complain about the Basic Pilot program. Here are his suggestions to improve the system:

* Create enhancements to federally-endorsed programs that aid employers in their efforts to determine the work eligibility of new hires. Do this by improving the Basic Pilot program to create a tamper-proof, biometric national identification card.

* Reconcile policy tension that exists for employers when managing the boundaries between employee verification and nondiscrimination.

* Be diligent in guarding against unintended consequences. Employer verification processes that do not safeguard against fraud may in fact create or support fraud.

* and finally, "Swift proposes that an industry advisory panel of subject matter experts be convened by the Department of Homeland Security to establish a forum in which the government's legitimate worksite enforcement responsibility can be achieved through action-oriented collaboration rather than conflicted policy and initiatives."

Source: Shandley's testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, held Sept. 1 in Loveland.