Does E-Verify Participation Lead to I-9 Fines?

"If you have been following their press releases, complaints, and settlement agreements over the past several months, the Department of Justice’s Office of Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices (OSC) has announced a number of settlements under the general heading of “document abuse” or “citizenship discrimination.”These settlements, touted along with the amounts of fines OSC has collected span multiple industries from janitorial (Commercial Cleaning Systems, Master Klean Janitorial) to food service (El Rancho Corp., SK Food Group) to construction (Potter Concrete). The settlements and their accompanying press releases are virtually identical, right down to the pro forma quotes from OSC officials. As the OSC website shows, settlements of these immigration-related unfair employment practices are nothing new, but the settlement agreements also share one other common thread: all of the settling parties participated in E-Verify and OSC initiated its investigations in almost all of these cases when a branch of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) referred the matters to OSC." - Douglas A. Hass, July 15, 2014.