Rhode Island recently dodged a bullet when controversial legislation that would have required all state employers to use E-Verify — the federal government’s much criticized citizenship-verification system — was allowed to die in the state Senate.

Rather than adopting questionable legislation on the last day of the session, calmer heads prevailed. For that, all Rhode Island employers and employees should be grateful.

What’s wrong with E-Verify? To start with, the program can’t detect the use of counterfeit identity documents or stolen Social Security numbers — two common tactics used by illegal immigrants to obtain jobs. Despite this major performance shortcoming, employers found with unauthorized workers on their payrolls, even those individuals approved by E-Verify, would have been subject to penalties.

E-Verify has also been criticized for its reliance on a federal database that contains a significant error rate — further marginalizing the effectiveness of the system, and endangering the ability of authorized workers to obtain jobs.

Finally, states shouldn’t be in the immigration business. It’s clearly a federal role. How can a multi-state employer — common in Rhode Island even for small businesses — be expected to follow conflicting state and local laws regarding employment verification?

The better solution is to put pressure on Congress to pass a mandatory, federal verification law. Rhode Island employers support the New Employee Verification Act (NEVA) — currently under debate in Congress. NEVA would transform a broken system into a state-of-the-art electronic verification program that would serve the interests of employers and employees by providing an effective tool to keep unauthorized workers from beating the system.

CINDY BUTLER

Jamestown

The writer is the director of government affairs for the Rhode Island State Council for the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), a nonprofit corporation, composed of over 800 human-resource professionals.