USCIS Revises Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9

Originally published November 2007

On November 7, 2007,U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a revised Employment Eligibility Verification Form (I-9) and updated the Handbook for Employers, Instructions for Completing the Form I-9 (M-274). All U.S. employers are required to complete a Form I-9 for each employee hired in order to verify that the individual is authorized for employment in the United States under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA).

The revision is intended to achieve full compliance with the document reduction requirements of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA), which reduced the number of documents employers may accept from newly hired employees during the employment eligibility verification process. In 1997, the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) published an interim final rule eliminating