Yesterday, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the Social Security Administration (SSA) will resume processing of E-Verify mismatches – marking the end to a very long “grace period” of sorts for affected employees that had been extended by the agency at the onset of the pandemic here in the US.
Starting July 15, 2022, employees whose E-Verify cases are referred to SSA on or after July 15, 2022, will once again have the normal 8 federal working days to contact their local SSA office to begin resolving the mismatch. E-Verify cases referred between March 2, 2020 and July 14, 2022, with a SSA mismatch will have until September 29, 2023 to resolve it as described in more detail below.
Background
In March 2020, as government offices and businesses across the US shuttered their doors as a result of COVID-19, the USCIS announced that they were extending the timeframe for employees to take action to resolve SSA-based mismatches (aka “TNCs” or tentative non-confirmations) due to the SSA office closures to the public.
Under normal pre-pandemic circumstances, an employee contesting a TNC must contact the government office within 8 federal government working days or risk getting a Final Non-confirmation and loss of employment. Employees with SSA TNCs usually need to visit a local SSA office, whereas DHS TNCs can typically be resolved over the phone (and thus no extension of time had been granted for these).
While many employers (and employees alike) appreciated the “TNC holiday” from E-Verify, the extended time period led to a rather large (and growing) queue of referred TNC cases with the SSA office that were essentially “frozen” in time. Last November, E-Verify announced that the agency began updating some of these frozen referred SSA TNCs with final responses – specifically, in cases where DHS had independently determined that the employee was not employment authorized, even though SSA has not been able to respond to their part of the TNC.
But the large majority of referred SSA TNCs remained frozen….until now.
Deadlines and Preferred Timeframes for Resolving Frozen TNCs
As noted above, as of July 15, 2022, employees whose E-Verify cases are referred to SSA on or after July 15, 2022, will have the normal 8 federal working days to contact their local SSA office to begin resolving the mismatch. Employees with mismatches that were referred between March 2, 2020 and July 14, 2022 (i.e., the “frozen cases”) will have until September 29, 2023 to resolve their long dormant cases – a fairly significant extension period, by DHS standards.
In making this announcement, the USCIS also provided a chart of “preferred” timeframes for employees to contact the SSA (depending upon when they received the TNC), presumably to avoid a mad rush of employees visiting the local SSA offices all at once. Notably, the earliest preferred date to begin contacting the SSA for these frozen cases is October 1, 2022 as illustrated below.
Read the full article here.