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You May Use E-Verify, But You Are Still at Risk of Losing Your Workers
This article highlights how even employers who use E-Verify remain vulnerable to identity fraud and ICE enforcement due to systemic weaknesses—especially the misuse of Social Security Numbers (SSNs). Drawing on recent Wall Street Journal reporting and federal data, the piece argues that employers must be wary of relying solely on E-Verify to vet the identity of their workers.
By Janice Kephart, Founder & CEO of ZipID
July 2025
Duplicate Social Security Numbers (SSNs) are one of the most common pathways for identity fraud to infiltrate the American workforce. Even among the 1.4 million employers who use E-Verify—a federal tool designed to check employment eligibility—gaps remain. Employers rely on E-Verify to protect themselves from fraudulent hires and ICE raids triggered by Form I-9 audits.But the truth is: E-Verify is not enough.
A recent Wall Street Journal exposé (July 2025) confirms what many of us in the identity verification and compliance field have long known: E-Verify can be easily defeated, and fraudulent workers continue to bypass its checks with alarming ease. The article gathered insights from law enforcement, immigration policy experts, and labor officials, and concluded that employers must go further—leveraging tools like biometrics—to truly authenticate identity and work authorization.
Real-World Failures of E-Verify
The Journal’s story offered chilling examples of real employers who had relied on E-Verify—and still became targets of identity fraud and enforcement actions:
- Glenn Valley Foods, a meat producer in Omaha, Nebraska, had been usingE-Verify for over a decade. Yet on June 11, 2025, dozens of masked federal agents raided the plant, detaining 76 workers. Seventy of those workers wereusing stolen SSNs and fake identities.
- At another meatpacking facility with 600 employees, more than half of the workforce—previously cleared by E-Verify—submitted documents that ICE deemed suspicious.
- In 2022, the Labor Department discovered that at least 102 children were illegally employed by Fortrex. These minors cleared E-Verify by using fake documents showing they were adults. Fortrex uses E-Verify on 100% of hires butstill sees fake IDs pass regularly.
Why E-Verify Fails to Catch Fake SSNs
While I go into this issue at length in “What E-Verify Isn’tTelling You” (ZipID Blog): (https://www.zipidapp.com/blogs/what-e-verify-is-not-telling-you),the problem specific to SSNs is that while the first check E-Verify does is to run an SSN (both name and number), it does not check for duplicates of the same number associated with a different name.
Thus, “approved” in E-Verify even when identity fraud has previously occurred, such as the name and Social Security number of aU.S. citizen or permanent resident is obtained. For the purposes of E-Verify, the actual SSN ID need not be shown, just the number entered digitally in theE-Verify portal, eliminating the need to even create a fake ID. According to the WSJ, “a U.S. citizen’s name and Social Security number can be purchased for about $1 on the dark web, or as low as 10 cents in bulk.”
The Broader Scope of SSN Misuse
These are not isolated incidents. Consider the wider landscape:
- 1.3 million SSNs tied to employment fraud (GAO, 2016)
- 818,000+ SSN misuse cases (IRS, TIGTA 2018)
- 69,323 fraudulent SSNs used for COVID loans, totaling ~$5.4B (PandemicOversight, 2023)
- 75% of undocumented workers use fake SSNs for employment (CIS, 2025)
- Children’s SSNs are 51x more likely to be used in synthetic fraud (Investopedia)
What This Means for Employers
E-Verify and the Form I-9 process are necessary, but increasingly insufficient. Fraudsters know that E-Verify can't detect stolen, borrowed, or synthetic identities.
Hiring individuals using fake identities exposes companies to financial penalties, reputational damage, and operational disruption if ICE intervenes.Even worse, child labor can slip through when age verification isn’t reliable.
Biometric identity verification offers a path forward. Technologies like facial recognition, OCR, and liveness detection verify the person—not just the document.
That’s why I’ve dedicated years to building ZipID. I understood the scale of the problem early on—and while the federal government’s intent with E-Verify is well-placed, it can’t overcome the shortcomings of thesister agencies it depends on, like the Social Security Administration.
Learn More
• What E-Verify Isn’t Telling You (ZipID Blog):https://www.zipidapp.com/blogs/what-e-verify-is-not-telling-you
• GAO Report: https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-17-419.pdf
• IRS Inspector General:https://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2019reports/201940014fr.pdf
• CIS Identity Fraud Study:https://cis.org/Report/Illegal-Immigrant-Identity-Fraud
• U.S. DOL Child Labor Report:https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217
If you use E-Verify, great—but it’s time to go further. ZipID can help protectyour business from fake identities, failed audits, and workforce disruption. Contact us to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
ZipID is an I-9 compliance and identity verification platform that combines facial recognition, OCR document capture, and fraud detection to verify new hire identities and complete Form I-9 in under 8 minutes — with a legally compliant audit trail built in. It is the only I-9 platform built by the person who helped write the federal identity doctrine behind the law.
Yes. ZipID is designed to satisfy all five federal electronic I-9 system requirements under 8 CFR § 274a.2, including compliant audit trails, electronic signature protocols, and secure storage standards — including the March 2026 ICE reclassification of substantive violations.
It is completely the employer's choice. Facial authentication can assure that a new hire is who they say they are, and the ID they present matches their live self.
This is especially important for remote workers, or industries subject to immigration fraud or economic espionage from foreign adversaries who may pose as Americans for access to proprietary information.
ZipID uses NIST-validated biometric facial recognition at 99.998% accuracy to match a live selfie to the photo on the new hire's government-issued ID. OCR extracts and autofills document data, and fraud detection checks for tampered, synthetic, or spoofed documents.
ZipID completes the entire Form I-9 process — including identity verification, document capture, and E-Verify — in under 8 minutes, for both remote and in-person new hires.
As of January 2, 2025, I-9 paperwork violations carry fines of $288 to $2,861 per form under 8 CFR § 274a.10(b)(2). Knowingly hiring unauthorized workers carries fines up to $28,619 per worker for repeat offenses. ICE audit rates in 2025 ran at least ten times higher than in 2024.
ZipID plans to become a certified E-Verify third-party agent by August 2026. E-Verify completion is currently part of the I-9 workflow after the employer signs the form, with ZipID toggling to E-Verify, and then data from the E-Verify case is autofilled into the Additional Information box on the I-9 form, for preservation and audit purposes.
ZipID was founded by Janice Kephart, former counsel to the 9/11 Commission and a national security identity expert with 25 years of federal and private sector experience, as a lawyer and policy and technology identity expert. Kephart authored the federal identity doctrine and biometric entry-exit recommendations that underlie today's I-9 compliance framework. She has testified before Congress 19 times on identity-related issues, and is an I-9 expert.