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Comment by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that what the E-Verify [1] system was supposed to be? Several companies are now discovering it's not all it's cracked up to be, as ICE shows up at their door.

[1] https://www.e-verify.gov/

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E-verify is just to check employment authorization, it's not a general identity service.

We don't need a general identity service though. We need to know whether someone is authorized to work for a US employer, right? How can a DPRK worker have the necessary authorization? If they use someone else's identity, isn't that something e verify should catch? If these are US citizens/nationals/residents working out of DPRK, who cares?

They can buy, steal, or hire yours. If it were a general identity service, yours would get tracked. But if it's just a matter of authorization, with no authentication, they'd just use it indefinitely.

I suspect some of the fake job postings are schemes to harvest that type of data. If I live in Atlanta and someone uses my identity to get a job in Seattle, how long will it take for me to learn about the company in Seattle that thinks it hired me, especially if they don't use my home address.

One of the many reasons I don't like to give references, social security number, date of birth, and so on to anyone except the end client hiring manager. I don't really care if the talent manager software has a required field to put last four of social security number. I simply don't trust random job postings to keep my information secure.

Would it help if I could query some IRS service to check what paychecks have been sent to me? Does this have a delay of a quarter year or more?

How do these people avoid getting the people they impersonated and or scammed in trouble with the IRS?

You would also exclude everyone that is not a US resident; which might or might not be what you want.

I would guess many (most?) of the places with this problem are actually fine with people that aren't living in the US; just not in North Korea.

> We need to know whether someone is authorized to work for a US employer, right?

E-verify is only for US residents, and depends on the employer interacting in person with the prospective employee.

Its primary goal is to check that someone is a legal resident, so it has no bearing on hiring remote foreign workers.

Yes. It confirms someone with a particular name, DOB, and SSN is authorized to work in the US. It doesn't confirm that the person claiming to be that person actually is that person. It relies on the employer to be able to match the applicant to the photo in e-verify, which isn't always an easy task.

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