Stephen Dinan reports in the Washington Times that the Social Security Administration—an integral part of the E-Verify government background check system—regularly fails to use E-Verify properly.

Despite helping run the government’s electronic database designed to weed out illegal-immigrant workers, Social Security failed to run E-Verify checks on its own employees nearly 20 percent of the time.

That’s according to this report, which also found that SSA failed to verify employees during the correct time-frame a whopping 49% of the time.

E-Verify is not supposed to be used for pre-screening, but SSA ran a background check before hiring new employees 25% of the time. Fifty-one percent were screened timely. The remaining 24% were screened after the seven-day window during which new hires are supposed to be screened.

If the federal agency at the heart of this background check system can’t operate it well, this casts doubt on the idea of mandating every private employer across the country to use it.

I discussed some of the problems with programs like E-Verify in my paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”