USACM Urges Contress to Build in Safeguards for Automated Employment Checks

ACM Technews points to an article regarding Chair of their U.S. Public Policy Committee Eugene H. Spafford's testimony at a Congressional hearing yesterday on employment verification systems and their impact on the Social Security Administration. Spafford recounted several potential problems in a pilot system run by the Department of Homeland Security to electronically check on employee work eligibility.

Dr.Spafford urged Congress to include safeguards to ensure that both employers and employees are sufficiently protected from technical failures and/or abuses of the system.

"As technologists, we are acutely aware of the limitations and failure modes of current information technology," Dr. Spafford noted. "What makes this especially serious is that some of those failures may result in unemployment for unfortunate and innocent victims. Any system must take the extreme failure modes into account and provide appropriate safeguards to avoid injury to the blameless seeking gainful employment to better themselves."

Dr. Spafford identified three major concerns regarding the automated employment verification system known as E-Verify about which he testified before the Subcommittee on Social Security of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means.

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