Need a job? Get a card - arresting ID pitch to business

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/03/business_immigrant_checks/print.html>

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 Original URL:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/03/business_immigrant_checks/

Need a job? Get a card - arresting ID pitch to business
By John Lettice (john.lettice at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 3rd December 2004 16:11 GMT

Analysis It might not be your Big Brother's Database, but the UK ID scheme
has certainly mastered doublespeak. Take, for example, the way it will
force businesses to joyfully embrace ID card checks - or else.

The Bill's Regulatory Impact Statement tells us that the bill has no
provisions "which allow the Government to require business, charities or
voluntary bodies to make identity checks using the identity cards scheme."
And indeed it doesn't. But David Blunkett gave us a taste of what this
really means in his speech to the IPPR last month. Referring to the
provisions of the 1996 Asylum and Immigration Act which require employers
to check that potential employees are eligible for employment (i.e. not
illegal immigrants), he noted that "clause 8 has been very difficult to
implement because employers quite rightly say that they are not an
immigration service and they can't easily ascertain whether someone is
legally in the country without great difficulty."?

Under the Act it is a criminal offence for an employer to fail to make an
adequate check, but this particular provision is a difficult one to bring
in and to enforce, because employers and their organisations could
reasonably protest about cost and about not being an immigration service,
and because if the Home Office did prosecute then they'd most likely fail
to get a conviction because the employer could claim to have seen a
document that looked genuine, and how the blazes were they to know? Well,
hello employers, now you are an immigration service.

Blunkett continued: "The verification process under ID cards would remove
that excuse completely and people would know who was entitled to be here
and open to pay taxes and NI." So once the scheme exists there's no reason
for the Home Office not to enforce clause 8, and employers are going to
find using the ID scheme pretty compelling - or else.

The Impact Statement suggests the card will be beneficial to employers
because it will reduce the cost of compliance with the 1996 Act, and
therefore it can be expected that employers will want to use the scheme
"even in advance of any explicit requirement to use the scheme." Which does
rather sound like 'we're not making you use it in the Act, but just not
yet.' Note that the extra costs (large) that employers will be saving by
using the ID scheme are costs that have been imposed by the Government in
turning them into an immigration service under the 1996 Act. As an aside
you should also note that recent regulation of employment agencies has
imposed a broader requirement for them to check the identities of job
applicants - so they're a census bureau as well as an immigration service.

Employers don't have to check via the ID scheme, and under the Act it will
actually be illegal to insist on such a check prior to cards becoming
compulsory, but the scheme would "help to enforce the law against
unscrupulous employers who would no longer have a defence in claiming they
examined an unfamiliar document which appeared genuine to them. And:
"...the Government expects that legitimate employers would want to
encourage their employees to provide verifiable proof of identity when
taking up a job... The scheme allows for records of on-line verification
checks to be held, so establishing whether an employer has complied with
the law will be more straightforward."

Now, that one's very cute indeed. The Home Office is determined that the ID
scheme operates via checks to the National Identity Register, rather than
simply as a photo ID upgrade that can be checked locally, the main reason
for this being that widespread online checking will generate a nationwide
network of ID checks that track back to the Home Office. Here it is
pointing out that using an online check will protect the employer because
the NIR will have an audit trail proving that the check was made, whereas
if the employer just looked at the card, we'd only have their word for
that, wouldn't we? So we'll just rub it in: " Only an on-line check would
give an employer the assurance that a record of the check would be held on
the National Identity Register and would therefore provide a defence
against prosecution."

Clearly it's going to be a lot safer to embrace the ID scheme sooner rather
than later, but there's one snag here. It will, as the Act specifies, be
illegal for an employer to insist on an ID card as proof of identity, so if
the applicant insists on using something else then the employer would have
to accept it, right? But as not using the ID card would be more expensive
and riskier for the employer, one would expect employers to be less likely
to give the applicant a job. Particularly if they had a funny
foreign-sounding name. And as anybody checking ID will rightly be wary of
asking "only certain groups for proof of identity for fear of being accused
of discrimination", from the employer's point of view the sooner they can
get all applicants to submit an ID card for checking, the better.

The Government hasn't yet decided on whether or not to charge employers for
employee checks against the register. It observes that charging individual
citizens for compulsory notifications such as address changes "might be
counter-productive" (indeed - but what do they mean "might"?), and one
could speculate that charging employers might be similarly so. Once however
it's widely used by employers in order to avoid prosecution, then they can
be argued to be saving the costs they'd otherwise incur for checking ID
(via the 1996 Act requirement), and as they'll be using the ID scheme quite
a lot already, they'll also then be able to save money by using it more
generally, "simplifying the recording of employee data". They can therefore
give the money they've thus 'saved' to the Government when the fees are
introduced.

Most employers may wonder why they're being put through these hoops, and
forced to spend all this money, and then save a bit of it, on voluntarily
supporting the ID card scheme. With justification. The Impact Statement
identifies the problem of illegal working as occurring "in sectors where
principally casual, low-skilled jobs prevail e.g. construction,
textiles/clothing, hotel & catering, household services/cleaning,
agriculture and the sex industry." These industries aren't major
concentrations of Register readership (we don't think so, anyway), and
they're not likely to be busting guts to institute ID checks and start
paying national insurance contributions either.

Not voluntarily, so this is how it works. At the moment people operating in
these areas are subject to sporadic raids by the Immigration and
Nationalities Directorate, which unlike the police already has powers to
check ID. These raids frequently net illegal immigrants, overstayers etc,
but because of the current difficulties with the 1996 Act it's difficult to
prosecute the employers. But an employer caught repeatedly when there is
"no excuse" will surely have to start checking, meaning that the Government
feels it will be able to make a major impact on casual labour and illegal
immigrants in these industries (at the expense of all the other industries).

Other sectors are likely to face similarly persuasive efforts to get them
to 'volunteer' themselves into the scheme. Much of the public sector will
have little choice but to volunteer, and although the banks and credit card
companies are unlikely to want to supplant their own security with the ID
card (aside from using it to fulfill current legal identity requirements
for, say, opening a bank account), it's probably only a matter of time
before more sticks arrive. The Home Office says it's investigating
incorporation of ID card readers in next generation credit card
verification machines, and if it gets these there are a couple of
regulatory routes it could take. It could for example insist on ID checks
for card transactions over a certain value (as is the law in Spain), and it
could make loud outraged noises about false credit card applications and
require proof of ID when opening an account. The credit card companies will
embrace neither of these voluntarily (it discourages customers), but if the
card slots were there and everybody was ordered to do it, well, maybe
that'd be different. And then the supermarket checkout could be an
immigration service too.
-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'