Crosposted From: Take Back Georgia

The AJC article below shows Goldkist doing exactly what all employers should - checking the SSN#’s of potential employees with the National SSN Database.

It’s not perfect, because you can’t verify if the card actually belongs to the person standing in front of you, but at least you know if the number is valid in the first place.

Regardless, it’s a start, and if the database could include a cross-check of the name of the card holder, then we’d really be moving in the right direction.

Don’t think this is a problem? Guess who the illegals’ favorite targets of SSN # fraud? AMERICAN CHILDREN.

Why?

Because odds are, neither the child nor the parents will ever know there is anything amiss, until he/she tries to get a job. You know, when they’re TEENAGERS?

Gives the illegals at least 15 or so years of working on a false SSN#, completely undetected.

Don’t believe me? JG with the Stand up for America Yahoo group gives us A perfect example in his transcript below of the Lou Dobbs show on May 12th, 2006.

Gold Kist fights documents fraud
Poultry firm says U.S. data key to legality in hiring

By MARGARET COKER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 05/13/06

WASHINGTON — As far as Atlanta-based Gold Kist is concerned, the best way to curb the number of illegal immigrants working in America is to do what the company has been doing for nine years.

Gold Kist, a poultry company, checks documents held by its approximately 8,000 immigrant employees through an online system run by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Service Administration.

Within minutes, it usually has an answer: The job applicant may or may not work in the United States.

“It’s really worked well for us. It’s the best program that the government has offered to us to make us compliant with the law,” said Wayne Lord, vice president of corporate relations for Gold Kist.

As Congress examines ways to block the hiring of illegal immigrants in America, lawmakers are focused on making employers a more robust first line of defense. Both the House and Senate are considering making it mandatory for all 5.8 million U.S. employers to use the federal program that Gold Kist and a couple thousand other businesses voluntarily participate in now.

But what has helped the Georgia company weed out illegal immigrants from its work force won’t solve the problem nationwide, federal officials and immigration experts warn.

While the Basic Pilot Program works well for companies that want to comply with federal mandates, the system has large holes that allow both businesses and illegal immigrants determined to skirt the law to keep doing so.

Stopping illegal immigration “is like saying we are going to win the war on drugs,” said Michael Everitt, the head of the DHS Forensics Document Laboratory, the headquarters of the government’s anti-fraud division.

“There’s no easy solution. There’s no silver bullet. The best you can hope for, however, is better than what we have right now.”

Federal security officials estimate that most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country have fraudulent Social Security cards, the document that is necessary for work in America.

Currently, the only system for employers to verify the immigration status of workers is the Basic Pilot Program.

Since 1997, with a mandate from Congress, government officials have been developing a computer database that would be able to quickly and effectively check a job applicant’s Social Security number.

Immigration and Social Security Administration officials started testing the service that year with business volunteers in five immigrant-heavy states, including Florida and Texas. Last year, the government made it available to any employer in the country.

Gold Kist is a veteran of the program, with its plants in Florida participating from almost the first day.

The Basic Pilot program is easy to use, Lord said. Human resource officials log onto a government Web site, enter the Social Security number given by the applicant, and that number is run through government databases to affirm whether it is valid.

If the number is found within the database, the response is immediate: The person is approved for work. If the number is not found, then he or she has to go to a local Social Security office to check the online response and receive a work verification certificate if it was wrong.

However, the system does not provide answers to whether the number offered by a job applicant is actually a number that is assigned to him — or whether it’s a number that was fraudulently obtained.

The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, audited the Basic Pilot Program last year and concluded that the system does an acceptable job detecting some cases of attempted fraud.

One such case is when a business uses the same Social Security number for multiple workers — a good indicator that an employer is trying to hire large numbers of illegal immigrants.

The program can also ferret out gross examples of counterfeiting, such as when a potential employee has a Social Security number with all zeros — a typical display on a forged card, the GAO said in a report issued last August.

Where it falls flat, however, is the issue of identity fraud and fraudulently obtained documents, the report said.

“How do you know if the card given to you by the guy in front of you is actually the guy that should be carrying the card in his pocket? The answer is you don’t and the government doesn’t,” said Audrey Sawyer, an immigration expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

Everitt, a 20-year veteran forensic investigator, recommends creating a card that every immigrant would need to have for work. It would include security coding that would make it hard to counterfeit, much like the technology going into printing money, and perhaps some biometric information.

“This would close the gaps on any question about whether the person and the card match,” Everitt said. “The technology and know-how is there for such a solution.”

Despite the concerns with Basic Pilot, Congress has made it the focal point in legislation about what role employers should play in deterring illegal immigration.

Along with tougher sanctions for businesses that hire illegal immigrants, a bill passed by the House would require all businesses to screen all employees on their payroll as well as new hires — a number that reaches to about 140 million people.

A Senate bill that could come to a vote next week proposes screening new hires and a limited number of people hired previously — specifically, those who have jobs important to the nation’s security.

The GAO estimates that the cost of designing and issuing a secure ID for immigrant workers would cost the federal government billions of dollars.

Officials working for the biometric industry say a solution would be cost-effective for businesses because the price of biometric readers have become viable for commercial use.

Everitt, however, says it would be worth it, no matter the controversies raised by privacy advocates or immigration activists.

“Creating a program to issue a secure ID or national card, call it whatever you want to, is the best way to curb illegal immigration,” he said.

Lord says that his company is happy with the Basic Pilot program, although he doesn’t like the way it turns human resources employees into amateur detectives.

He also believes that Gold Kist’s participation in the program deters illegal immigrants from applying for jobs at the company, a fact he deduces from the decreasing number of attempted forgeries his HR department comes across.

Still, if the law required a national ID card for employment verification, Gold Kist would gladly switch to the new system.

“We will follow the letter of the law no matter what it says,” Lord said.

Illegal Alien theft of Social Security Numbers - especially those belonging to children.
Below a transcript from a Lou Dobbs, CNN broadcast of May 12, 2006 . . .

DOBBS: This nation’s illegal alien crisis has triggered a serious nationwide identity theft crisis. And when our officials talk about identity theft, they seldom mention illegal immigration and the role it’s playing.

Prosecutors tonight say illegal aliens are increasingly stealing Social Security numbers from America’s children. In their efforts to work in this country illegally, illegal aliens are jeopardizing the future of some of our youngest citizens.

Kitty Pilgrim reports.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): According to tax records, this little girl in Utah was driving 80 miles a day to work in a steakhouse. She’s clearly not doing that. Her Social Security number was being used by an illegal alien for work papers. Her mother was outraged.

KELLY SMITH, MOTHER: That somebody could buy my daughter’s Social Security number without any of us knowing, that it could have gone on for 16 years, we were lucky that it got caught when she was 5. But it still went on for five years.

PILGRIM: The attorney general’s office uncovered the fraud and called the family, but Utah estimates at least 80,000 illegal aliens live in the state and a growing number are using stolen Social Security numbers for work papers. For Utah, it’s a newly-discovered crime that has grown in the last five years, but now the crime is epidemic.

RICHARD HAMP, UTAH ASST. ATTORNEY GENERAL: In the year 2000, 132,000 Utahns had had their Social Security numbers compromised by someone else using them for employment purposes, more than likely mostly illegal immigrants that were here using them. That was roughly about 5 percent of the Utah population back then, which is a huge number. There’s no other crime that I know of that affects 5 percent of the population at once like that does.

PILGRIM: Utah began aggressively pursuing Social Security fraud when it found widespread abuse in its public assistance program. The federal government hasn’t been nearly as aggressive.

KIRK TORGENSEN, UTAH CHIEF DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: I am just dumbfounded that we as a government can sit back and know that that information is there, know that that individual, the legitimate person with a number, could be victimized, may be being victimized, and that we’re not doing anything to notify that person.

PILGRIM: The national office of the Social Security Administration says numbers from children are often stolen from medical paperwork when they are infants. Children are targeted because discrepancies are less likely to turn up until they look for a job in their teenage years.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PILGRIM: The Social Security Administration today told us by law they’re not allowed to contact people when their number is stolen. They say it would require Congress to change the law for them to be able to inform people when they’ve been victimized. So people can go for decades without finding out — Lou.

DOBBS: Did the Social Security Administration tell you what law prevented them from doing that?

PILGRIM: Actually, they did not.

DOBBS: The fact of the matter is, I think the Social Security Administration is, to put it politely, full of it. And I think they’re rationalizing a failure to safeguard Social Security card holders.

PILGRIM: They told us they can only speak to the IRS about it, that’s it. But I believe that it’s more complicated than that — Lou.

DOBBS: Well, certainly our Congress and our president, who have at least some time on their hands here to deal with this issue, might want to deal with this rather quickly.

Kitty, an excellent report. Thank you.

Kitty Pilgrim.

Feel all warm and fuzzy, now? Yeah. Me neither.

I guess I need to start pulling my childs’ credit report.

Oh….and buying a lot of Sunkist Orange juice…you know, to thank them for at least trying to follow the law…

**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email the coalition and let us know at what level you would like to participate.