IBIA calls for injecting biometrics into Basic Pilot

Depending on your political prefercnes, the collapse of the comprehensive immigration bill in Congress may be a good thing or a bad thing. The biometric industry, however, stand to benefit either way. No sonner was the final vote on the bill taken, that the International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA) called on Congress, the administration, and key industries to continue to work on ways to strengthen the U.S. current employment verification system and use technologies like biometrics that help verify people’s work authorization status.

Walter Hamilton, IBIA’s chairman, says: “Our industry, like many others, is disappointed that the bill did not make it out of the Senate. While we supported its passage, we believed like many others, that the bill left room for improvements, specifically in the area of employment verification, a key driver to addressing the immigration issue.”

IBIA says that today’s verification effort — the Basic Pilot program — is woefully inadequate. It is a voluntary employment verification system which is being used by only about 11,000 employers in the United States (out of more than twenty-five million). The program continues to rely on names and biographic information to verify identity, so it remains easy to circumvent with fraudulent and stolen identities. IBIA says that to implement a reliable and effective employment verification system, “it is imperative that the backbone system use biometrics, the most effective means available to positively verify a claim of identity and that a person is authorized to work.”

The association emphasizes that biometrics can easily be injected into the process and the Basic Pilot system upgraded to help ensure that people are who they claim to be when they apply for employment. Hamilton concludes: “Biometrics are an important tool to eliminate the jobs incentive for illegal immigration and to take the guesswork out of the equation for human resources personnel who must decide whether someone is authorized to work. We believe that this issue will not go away, and hope we can preserve some of the intent of the comprehensive bill and see some of the individual elements be addressed through separate legislation.”