What’s the Price of Outsourcing?
by Bill Zalud
April 1, 2008
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Contract security
officers are the most popular outsourcing service. What is happening lately is
the effectiveness of employment screening.
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Contract
security officers, burglar alarm monitoring, investigative services, due
diligence all are outsourced security services. There are emerging services
such as third party access control and security monitoring services.
All are increasing in interest to chief security officers.
But there still are concerns about the effectiveness of such efforts.
A Cato Institute study reports that electronic employment
verification is ineffective, intrusive and expensive.
E-Verify, the program promoted by the Bush administration to
reduce illegal immigration, would be ineffective, invasive and costly, finds a
study by the Cato Institute.
THERE ARE TECH PROBLEMS
“A full-fledged Electronic Employment Verification (EEV)
system has many practical and technical problems -- to say nothing of the
question of whether it is appropriate for a free country -- and would still
fail to prevent illegal immigration,” says Jim Harper, Cato’s director of
Information Policy Studies and author of “Electronic Employment Verification:
Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”
To be done effectively,
EEV would require an expensive national ID system which would greatly impinge
upon the privacy of American citizens. “The things necessary to make a system
like this really impervious to forgery and fraud would convert it from an
identity system into a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system,” writes the
author. This would increase the value of committing identity fraud, and the
amount and type of information stored in the databases would expose Americans
to grave security risks.
EEV would make applying for jobs a hassle for all American
citizens and it would effectively deny some law-abiding individuals the ability
to work. A study by the SSA Inspector General revealed an error rate of 4.1
percent in the data used to administer the Basic Pilot program, now renamed
E-Verify. At that rate, 1 in every 25 new legitimate hires would receive a
“tentative nonconfirmation,” requiring the individual to go through a
burdensome process to seek permission to work from the Social Security
Administration and Department of Homeland Security.
The cost of such a program,
including the preliminary national ID system, is estimated to be $17 billion,
$11 billion of which would fall directly on state governments. The remaining $6
billion would be shouldered by American citizens as they struggle to prove
their right to work in this country.
“’Mission creep’ all but guarantees
that the federal government would use an EEV system to extend federal
regulatory control over Americans’ lives even further,” writes Harper. In the
immigration area alone, proposals have been made to regulate housing in the
same way as employment. Healthcare and gun control, among others, are two areas
that are especially vulnerable to such mission creep.
As the history of immigration law has proven,
“immigrants and employers dedicate their ingenuity to getting what they want
and need,” contended Harper. As a result, internal enforcement of immigration
law has been a failure for the past 20 years. There is no reason to believe EEV
would be any different. Further, the author concludes: “with nationwide
electronic employment verification, the United States would move to a regime
where the last word on employment decisions would not be with the worker and
employer but with bureaucrats in the federal government.”
SIDEBAR: Background Screening
Research shows that more than 85 percent of large
companies and institutions and a rapidly growing number of small and mid-sized
companies now perform some kind of background screening. The focus of this
movement is principally the assurance of a safe, secure workplace for all
employees. The statistics showing the popularity of background screening,
however, mask what has been, for most companies, a jumble of disparate,
time-consuming programs and practices implemented in different offices and
departments in different ways with virtually endless possibilities for human
error. Often, connection between the hiring professionals and the security
department is not tight, and loose controls provide little assurance that the
company’s security policies and procedures are enforced in the hiring process.
The result is increased exposure, hiring mistakes and additional costs related
to manual, error-prone processes.
Fighting that perception, HireRight Enterprise is an
on-demand screening management solution used by hiring professionals in
companies and institutions to easily and efficiently oversee a legally
compliant background and drug screening program that typically includes the
screening of applicants and employees company-wide. The industry’s first Web
2.0 application, HireRight Enterprise brings together all screening activities,
tasks and tools into a single application – all viewable from a summary
dashboard – replacing the need to use manual processes, paper or multiple
disparate programs to successfully operate a screening program.
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