Georgia construction company to pay over $200,000 in fines for Form I-9 violations

The assessment of over $228,000 in fines to Georgia construction company, M&D Masonry, reveals a few lessons about how to treat your Forms I-9.

While some employers think they can cut corners with Forms I-9, many don't realize the plausible threat of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) knocking at the door. If ICE audits and finds something they don't like, namely Form I-9 non-compliance, companies can expect to be fined as much as M&D Masonry.

ICE has been hitting companies hard with I-9 audits in recent years, with seemingly no intention of slowing down.Attorney Dustin J. O'Quinn wrote on Lexology, a legal information website, that no employer is safe from an ICE audit. He wrote that in 2012, more than 3,000 I-9 audits were conducted with over $13 million in fines assessed to employers.

While some think that not hiring undocumented workers will insulate the company from audits and penalties, this only creates a sense of false security. I-9 audits don't focus on the employees themselves as much as the employers’ proper completion of Forms I-9. This means that even a company immaculate in its hiring of authorized workers may still receive large fines due to Form I-9 errors.

Montserrat C. Miller, another attorney with Lexology, explained that the penalizations for M&D Masonry were supposed to amount to almost $332,000, but the judge granted the company some leniency by reducing ICE's initial fines.

According to Miller, M&D Masonry’s audit came about when a story was released in 2010 that featured a secretly taped conversation in which the foreman discussed hiring illegal workers. Following the release of the story, ICE sent a Notice of Inspection to the construction company requesting three years’ worth of employment records, payroll data, wage and hour reports among other files.

ICE brought two counts against M&D Masonry. Count I alleged that M&D failed to ensure that 277 employees properly completed section 1 of Form I-9 and/or failed itself to properly complete section 2 of the form. Count II alleged that the company failed to prepare and/or present the forms for 87 employees.

Though the construction company was brought to ICE's attention following a report about undocumented workers, all of the fines assessed against the construction company stemmed from paperwork violations.

The judge made mention of the fact that blank Forms I-9 were pre-signed, using a rubber stamping process before completion. These stamped forms were stored until needed in the case of a new hire. Rubber stamps, of course, are not considered to be proper signatures or attestations for the Form I-9. In some cases, Section 1 was completed months or even years after Section 2. In issuing her sentencing, the judge said that this conduct failed to reflect a reasonable attempt by the employer to comply with its obligations, and that the pre-signing of hundreds of I-9 forms in batches was found to constitute “false attestation.”

How to avoid the mistakes that M&D Masonry made
Miller stated that although fines range from $110 to $1,000 per Form I-9, they can add up quickly due to other factors. A company should never think of ICE fines as small, because there is a chance they will compound exponentially until the company owes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to ICE, fines are determined by adding the total penalizations assessed for knowingly hiring and continuing to employ violations, with the fines for substantive or uncorrected technical violations.

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