As I note in the current issue of National Review, an audit by the inspector general of the Social Security Administration revealed that government agencies have been employing illegal aliens.
The audit was aimed at discovering the 100 U.S. employers who had filed the most W-2s using “nonwork” Social Security Numbers, a type of SSN given to aliens who are not authorized to work in the U.S. but claim to need an SSN anyway. (They used to give them out so aliens could get U.S. drivers licenses, and there are more than 7 million in circulation.)
Seventeen of the Top 100 employers filing W-2s with “nonwork” SSNs in tax years 2001-2003, it turned out, were government agencies. These included 7 federal, 7 state, and 3 local agencies.
When I asked the IG’s office to name these agencies, they said they could not do so because Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code prohibited that disclosure. The mere names of these government agencies filing massive numbers of W-2s with “nonwork” SSNs is supposedly privileged tax information.
A person using a “nonwork” SSN may or may not be an illegal alien. An alien originally given a “nonwork” SSN sometimes later secures a work visa, a green card or is naturalized as an American citizen. Sometimes, however, they do not. Not surprisingly, illegal aliens often use “nonwork” SSNs to work here illegally.
The IG’s audit discovered that the 17 unnamed government agencies had filed more than 49,000 W-2s using “nonwork” SSNs in the three years audited. A close examination of a random sample of 275 of the W-2s filed by the 100 employers audited included 36 of the government’s W-2s. Cross-checking these W-2s with Department of Homeland Security data, the IG discovered that 16 of these 36 government workers (or 44 percent) had never been authorized to work in the U.S. DHS could find no record at all for another one of the 36 government workers in the sample.
If the 44-percent ratio held up across the entire field of 49,000-plus government W-2s using “nonwork” SSNs that would mean the 17 government agencies in question filed more than 21,000 W-2s over three years on behalf of aliens not authorized to work in the U.S.
Don’t the American people have a right to know which government agencies did this–and what the government has done, if anything, to fix the problem–before Congress considers a massive new immigration bill?