BY JIM FABER, The Island Packet

 When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents found problems last month with the citizenship status of 43 employees of the Hilton Head Island Bi-Lo store, questions were raised as to why the store didn't check out their employees more thoroughly.

But, according to experts, just about any business could find itself in the same position.

Properly completing citizen and identity verification forms, called the I-9 form, is all a business can, and probably should, do in attempting to thwart fraud from those seeking employment illegally, according to a local immigration law expert and the government's guidelines.

"Employers are not required to be immigration experts," said Melissa Azallion, a labor and immigration lawyer with the Hilton Head office of the law firm Nexsen Pruet. "They are required to use a reasonable good-faith effort to examine those documents."

Employees have the choice of what documents they provide when filling out the I-9, and employers can't ask for specific forms of identification, said Azallion, a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Acceptable identification for the form includes permanent resident cards, unexpired employment-authorization cards, unexpired re-entry permits and unexpired refugee travel documents. The most commonly submitted documents are the permanent resident card, or green card, or a driver's license and Social Security card.

"Individuals do present fraudulent documents sometimes," Azallion said. "That's their choice."

If the documents seem valid, the employment-eligibility guidelines from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recommend no further questioning of the documents. Being too suspicious about the employee's documents could lead to legal problems for a business.

"You must examine the documents, and if they reasonably appear on their face to be genuine and to relate to the person presenting them, you must accept them," reads the immigration services' guidelines. "To do otherwise could be an unfair immigration-related employment practice."

That's what led to issues at the Bi-Lo store on Mathews Drive.

"We require that prospective employees present federally-mandated documents for employment, and immediately began to verify the correctness of these documents," said a statement from Joyce Smart, Bi-Lo's director of corporate communications. "Our own internal audit verified that all of the required documents were presented to us at employment."

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Marc Raimondi did not respond to several written and verbal requests made by The Island Packet over six business days for follow-up information on immigration arrests related to the Bi-Lo discrepancies.

Any employer can run Social Security name and number checks with the Basic Pilot Employment Verification Program run through the Department of Homeland Security. The program allows companies to sign up, free of charge, to use a database of Social Security information to verify who a number belongs to.

In practice, what this program does is allow companies to check information on a physical Social Security card against the government's information to see if the card is fraudulent, said Azallion.

Going forward, Bi-Lo will do weekly Social Security name and number checks to see look for discrepancies. If there are any discrepancies, such as a name spelled incorrectly, Bi-Lo will ask the applicant to get the correct information within 10 days to stay employed, Smart said.

Part of the problem is that some Hispanic people don't understand how important it is to correctly fill out an I-9 form, said Luis Bell, executive director of the Latin American Council of South Carolina on Hilton Head.

The organization offers help to workers and businesses that face issues with properly filling out I-9 forms for immigrants, especially when language is a barrier, but not many people ask for help, Bell said.

Although a few on both sides will always try to skirt the law, whether it is with fraudulent documents or unrecorded payments.

"Many don't take it seriously," he said, "neither the employer nor the employee."