The Trump administration will resume notifying U.S. businesses when information submitted on employee tax forms doesn’t match up with social security records, a longtime practice halted by the Obama administration.
From Daily Caller:
Beginning in 2019, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will send “no-match” letters to employers when a name and social security number combination provided by an employee does not match the agency’s records for that number.
Employers who fail to correct the records could be subject to IRS tax penalties, Bloomberg Law reported Tuesday.
The resumption of no-match letters also has significant implications for identifying illegal immigrants who have stolen a U.S. citizen’s social security number and used it to prove work authorization. As many as three-quarters of the 7 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. workforce possess a social security number that belongs to somebody else, according to SSA estimates.
No-match letters can be considered preliminary evidence that a worker is an illegal immigrant who appropriated a social security number to gain employment, according to a September report from the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). Using government records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, IRLI found 39 million instances of social security number mismatches between 2012 and 2016.
