U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made recent changes to policies related to Form I-9 compliance.
“While the recent surge in federal worksite enforcement has captured headlines, a much quieter policy update behind the scenes appears to significantly raise the stakes for employers facing a Form I-9 inspection,” said John Fay, director of product strategy at Equifax Workforce Solutions and an expert on I-9 issues. “ICE reclassified several common administrative Form I-9 errors as ‘substantive’ violations, significantly raising the stakes for employers facing audits. As a result, mistakes that might have been treated as correctable clerical errors could now be subject to immediate monetary penalties following a Form I-9 inspection,” he said.
ICE updated its Form I-9 inspection fact sheet online, where the agency’s apparent departure from established practice was revealed: errors that for many years have been classified as technical or procedural violations as now substantive violations.
Since 1996, the federal government split I-9 paperwork violations into two categories:
“Critically, [immigration law] provides employers with a statutory defense for technical failures,” Fay said. “If ICE identifies a technical error during an audit, they must provide the employer with a minimum of 10...
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