USCIS earlier this week, published new guidance on how to enter an employee’s US passport or visa number into E-Verify when the system doesn’t accept it.

There are occasions when E-Verify won’t accept an employee’s US passport or visa   The usual rule is that you should enter a document number exactly as it appears on the employee’s Form I-9, but sometimes doing exactly that doesn’t work.

USCIS announced that it has updated the help screens for US passport and visa numbers to reflect new guidance on how to enter these numbers in E-Verify.  A permanent fix for entering these numbers is in development and will be implemented in 2011.

In the meantime…What you need to know:

• If an employee’s US visa number isn’t exactly 8 digits, don’t enter it; leave the field blank (it’s an optional field)
• If an employee’s US passport consists of a letter followed by 7 digits, replace the letter with two zeroes (00) so that you enter exactly 9 digits
• For US passport cards, always use an uppercase ‘C’ when entering the number – the field is case sensitive

You may be wondering, why restrict what can be entered?

USCIS does this because they want to minimize the number of typos and incorrect information entered into E-Verify.  For example, several sets of numbers appear on a US visa.  If the field isn’t restricted to 8 digits, it would be easy for a user to enter the wrong number.