Use of "No Match" Letters Temporarily Suspended
As noted in previous Newsletter articles, a “no match letter” is one which is issued, usually by the Social Security Administration (SSA), to employers to inform them that a worker’s name and the social security number reported for them do not match. Obviously, there could be a variety of reasons for such a discrepancy. In certain cases, the “no match” could result from the fact that the worker in question is not legally authorized to work in the United States. New regulations issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would have, in effect, required employers to terminate all employees identified in “no match” letters who could not successfully resolve the discrepancy within a period of approximately 90 days after the employer’s receipt of the no match letter. However, a preliminary injunction against those regulations has been issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and remains in effect.
A spokesman for the SSA recently announced that, given the issuance of the injunction against the no match regulations, it did not have time to revise and send new versions of no match letters which would not have language required by the enjoined regulations and, accordingly, the SSA is temporarily suspending their use.
Previously, the SSA had estimated that it would send out approximately 140,000 letters to employers based upon Social Security reports from 2006. Instead, the decision was made to suspend that mailing and to concentrate on revising the letter. It is expected that the use of the no match letters will resume sometime in April 2008 based upon payroll reports filed in 2007
