Under a Bush Administration plan, the Social Security Administration was going to send out a huge number of letters to employers about instances in which workers' names and Social Security numbers did not match. Unless these discrepancies were resolved within 90 days, employers were supposed to fire the employees or face serious penalties. This plan has been sidelined by a preliminary injunction issued by a San Francisco federal judge. Whatever good or bad effects this plan might have had upon immigration enforcement, it threatened to have a devastating effect upon the understaffed Social Security Administration. An excerpt from a New York Times article hints at what might have happened -- and what might happen yet if this injunction is lifted:
In a December 2006 report cited in the court documents, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration estimated that 17.8 million of the agency’s 435 million individual records contained discrepancies that could result in a no-match letter being sent to a legally authorized worker. Of those records with errors, 12.7 million belonged to native-born Americans, the report found.
To bad the letters can't be sent out to cause the firing of some bonehead judges.
ReplyDeleteYou have the ACLU and AFL-CIO stopping the letters from going out. Where is the American Federation of Common Sense?