Utah Legislature: Employee verification bill passes Senate

SALT LAKE CITY — According to Social Security Administration records, Grace Weed has been a remarkably industrious employee the past eight years, having held 10 different jobs and, at one point, working simultaneously in Park City and Las Vegas.

Problem is, Grace is a 9-year-old Morgan grade school student who has, of course, never worked in Park City or Las Vegas, or anywhere else.

She is just one of the estimated 50,000 Utah children who have been the victims of identity theft, a problem Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, said he's figured out a way to solve with a bill that passed the Senate on Friday.

Buttars said SB251, which mandates all Utah businesses use a federal electronic screening system to ensure employees are who they say they are and legally allowed to work in the country, will stop child identity fraud completely.

"This bill has everything to do with people who have come to our state and figured out a way to get a Social Security number and go to work illegally," Buttars said. "This will stop, 100 percent, the problem."

Recent research findings indicate, however, that Buttars' contention may be only half right.

Westat, a statistical research group, released findings last December of a comprehensive survey of the most widely-used federal employee screening program, E-Verify, that shows the system was only successful 54 percent of the time in catching fraudulent document use. While the overall inaccuracy rate is much lower, 4.1 percent, E-verify falls down, according to the report, when it comes to the very problem Buttars is trying to address.

"This finding is not surprising," the report states. "Given that since the inception of E-Verify it has been clear that many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify."

Buttars acknowledged the Westat findings while presenting his bill on the Senate floor, but also cited a survey conducted by Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff's office that found E-Verify was over 90 percent effective in detecting document fraud in Utah. The real number, he said is likely "somewhere in between."

The bill passed by the Senate was a largely reworked version of the one approved by a committee last week.