Hey Warriors!
Welcome to another Members Only Pop-up Webinars for 2017. Today, I am reminding you of a few basics and explaining the increased penalties for “technical” errors that e-Verify will NOT protect you from incurring!
Please comment and let me know if you have questions.
Enjoy and BeAuditSecure!
Transcript:
Hey compliance warriors, Lisa Smith here with another pop up webinar. So I hope things are going well for you on this Monday February 6th and I wanted to talk to you a little bit because we are about two weeks or so now into the implementation of our new I-9 and so I want to make sure that all of you are, number one, using a new I-9 and just kind of answer a few questions that I have been getting on this whole new form. What we do and what we don’t do and so forth. So I’m making sure that you are using the form with an expiration date of 2019 and also making sure that you are using the form, which is three pages. So section one is on page one, section two is on page two, and then section three – which is our reverification section – is on the third page. Now if you have been able to play around with the new I-9 a little bit, you will notice that it has 15 pages of instructions and those instructions are wonderful, so please read those instructions. I know everybody kind of laughs and says 15 pages, but these are really good, nice recourses for us to get the answers we need and have it right there in writing. Quite honestly, that’s not be something that the folks at the I-9 have done a really great job with, so make sure you look through those 15 pages of instructions. Now most everything is pretty much the same. Just a couple of things to keep in mind are that at the top of page two, we still have the carry over name, but it looks a little different than the old I-9. Then at the top of page three, if you are using the re verification section, you’ll have to remember to carry over the name. Now one thing that you should really be aware of is that the penalties – the fines – for these little tiny technical errors on the I-9, will rise in 2017. For instance, last year, you could be fined 110 dollars per technical error made on the I-9. This might be something like, you didn’t have someone sign something appropriately, a date is missing, the dates of hire and the dates that you actually sign the I-9 are more than 3 days apart, an abbreviation that the auditor doesn’t see as being approved and so forth. Now if you are an e-verify participant, that doesn’t help you with technical errors. You still have to fill out the I-9 appropriately. So just keep that in mind. E-verify doesn’t exempt you from this. This year, that penalty has risen from 110 per error to 216 dollars per error so that’s almost double. We want to look at and see what are we doing with this I-9, is correct. If we find out through auditing our past efforts to complete an I-9 with an employee and we find that we had made a lot of errors in those past efforts, then we really want to look hard at what we are doing today going forward because not only do we want to go out and fix all of those previous problems, we also want to move forward doing it the right way. Now the good news is that the I-9 folks, when they come in to audit you, will give you a bulk discount, on all of your I-9 errors. It’s like Costco for the I-9, they will max you out at 10 penalties on the fines. So let’s say for instance 216 dollars per technical error and you have ten technical errors. Of course, then that’s 2160 dollars for that particular I-9. Well what if you had 20 penalties, does it double? No! They will max you out at 10 errors. So just keep in mind that the pervious penalty for the max on the I-9 was 1100 dollars and now it’s well over 2000. We all love going and buying paper towels and cleaner, at a bulk discount, but the thing about discounting the I-9 in bulk is that you have done a lot of stuff really wrong, and that’s one discount that is not really a good deal after all. So, really look at that and look at your I-9’s. Do your internal audit, and if you are HelpDesk users, which most of you are, you know that in our tool kit for payroll professionals, we have a whole section for the i-9 in there and we have some guidance on auditing the i-9. We have a check list and we have some letters to the file and sample letters written to employees that you can modify to fit their own circumstances and change up a little. We have them for the W-4 the I-9, classifying your workers as exempt or non-exempt. If you don’t have the payroll module, think about upgrading. Write an email to support and I will tell you how that works, but it is a very simple process and then you will have everything you need going forward. There’s so much more that I can say about the I-9 and I will in the future. But, today for our little pup up webinar, I just wanted to say, get in there and internally audit. Make sure you are using the correct I-9 and you are filling it out correctly because the penalties are jumping up sky high and you don’t want to be a part of that. Under this new administration, there is the idea that some areas are going to be softer on employers than they have been in the past. But immigration is probably not one of those areas. So FYI. Make sure your I-9s are in tip top shape. Alrighty, until next time, I’m Lisa Smith. Go get ’em out there and don’t forget – you can’t be audit proof, but you can be audit secure. Until next time, have a good one…..
Lisa Smith
