U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a press release on January 30 delaying the implementation of the regulation requiring employers to use a new Employment Eligibility Verification Form (Form I-9). The new form was originally scheduled to be required on February 2, 2009. USCIS instead reopened the comment period on the new regulation through March 4 and currently plans to implement the new form and corresponding documentary changes on April 3. For an overview of the changes to the I-9 process contained in the original regulation, see the January 2009 issue of the Immigration eAuthority.
In addition, the regulation requiring certain federal contractors to use E-Verify was again delayed until May 21. The Bush Administration had published a new regulation in November of last year requiring many federal contractors to use E-Verify for new hires and to reverify existing employees working on covered contracts (see Ogletree Deakins’ November 14, 2008 E-Alert). The implementation and effective date of the regulation was initially delayed from January 15 to February 20 (see Ogletree Deakins’ January 12, 2009 E-Alert) in the face of a lawsuit by interested business groups contesting the validity of the regulation. The Obama Administration again delayed implementation to May 21 not only due to the pending lawsuit, but also as part of an overall review of several recently promulgated regulations.
Note: This article was published in the February 2009 issue of the Immigration eAuthority.
