DHS changes to Form I-9 were supposed to make things easier for business to onboard their employees while maintaining compliance with employment eligibility requirements. By eliminating the in-person verification requirements, DHS allowed businesses’ HR teams to verify employement eligibility remotely.
This is, for most businesses, a great help. Companies that hire remote employees can avoid the expense of bringing them into company HQ for onboarding since Form I-9 can be completed remotely over a platform like Zoom or Teams.
Giving employers free access to E-Verify and eliminating the in-person verification requirement should, then, have made life easier for most if not all HR Teams.
That is, not the case, however.
For companies with large employee rosters and high turnover, the problem with I-9s has never been where and when they take place but rather the sheer volume of them. They represent a massive time investment from HR, which, even with the updated I-9 requirements, must nonetheless shepherd the New Hire through their completion.
With enough employees in the hiring pipeline, onboarding can become a full-time job. Consider how long it takes an HR employee to walk a New Hire through Form I-9, inspect their identification documents remotely, and take them through submission.
And that’s if everything goes right.
As every hybrid employee knows, confusion and error are much more common in virtual meetings than in those that take place in person.
Businesses with high turnover often find themselves in constant hiring cycle, onboarding sometimes upwards of 100 employees per month. Walking each and every one of them through Form I-9 in person would be tough, but doing it remotely is even more fraught.
Any mistakes that occur are, as always, the responsibility of the employer. It is the employer who falls out of compliance when Form I-9 is incorrectly submitted, not the employee.
This is why companies must do everything they can to ensure accuracy does not get sacrificed for efficiency.
And that’s where TrendSource’s Virtual I-9 Verifications come in.
By outsourcing Virtual I-9s, HR teams are unburdened of this rote but precarious and risky task. Instead, they hand it off to compliance experts, who can quickly and accurately complete I-9s for New Hires. Businesses and their HR teams no longer need worry about finding time to accurately complete Form I-9 with their New Hires, and no longer need fret over the devilish details of employment eligibility verification.
Learn more about TrendSource Virtual I-9 Verifications.