Other articles by Eunice Moscoso:

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WASHINGTON — Forcing companies to use a government system to verify the legal status of workers would cause thousands of citizens and legal residents to be initially rejected for work and cripple the Social Security Administration, critics told Congress Tuesday.

The system, known as E-Verify, is currently voluntary, but several proposals in Congress — including an immigration enforcement measure known as the SAVE Act — would make it mandatory.

John Trasvina, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said the E-Verify system relies on faulty databases from the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore would create an official "no-work" list requiring millions of U.S. citizens and legal workers to bear the burden of proving their legal status.

"Forcing a deeply flawed system upon an unstable economy is not the answer," he told the House Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security.

Using the Internet-based system, an employer can check immediately whether employees are in the United States legally by comparing their information to electronic government records. If the information doesn't match, the employee has an opportunity to correct the paperwork, often through a trip to a Social Security office.

The panel's chairman, Rep. Michael McNulty, D-N.Y., said he was concerned that Social Security offices could be overwhelmed with a "massive new workload" as U.S. citizens and other authorized workers try to correct their information. This could hurt efforts by the agency to reduce an unprecedented backlog of disability claims, he said.

Greg Heineman, president of the National Council of Social Security Management Associations Inc., which represents 3,400 Social Security managers and supervisors, predicted that making E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. employees would result in an "onslaught" of more than 10 million more visits to the agency's field offices.

Rep. Heath Shuler, a North Carolina Democrat who wrote the SAVE Act, said targeting employers is the key to solving the problem of illegal immigration and that the system works.

E-Verify is free and easy-to-use, and it allows participants to successfully match 93 percent of new hires to government databases in less than five seconds, Shuler said.

Of the remaining 7 percent, the vast majority do not contest the result, he added.

Shuler noted that every congressional staffer and employee of a federal agency has passed through the E-Verify system over the past decade.

"I have the utmost confidence in this program," he said.

The SAVE Act — it stands for Secure America with Verification and Enforcement — would mandate that all businesses use the system within four years. It also would increase the Border Patrol by 8,000 officers and train more state and local police to enforce immigration law.

In Arizona, a law implemented in January requires all companies to run new employees through E-Verify. It is now considering putting in place a guest-worker program to bring migrant workers into the state.

Several other states — including Georgia, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Utah, Mississippi, Oklahoma and North Carolina — have mandated E-Verify in varying degrees. A study last year by a private firm contracted by Homeland Security showed that naturalized citizens are far more likely than U.S.-born citizens to be found not eligible to work under the E-Verify system.

About 10 percent of foreign-born U.S. citizens received a "mismatch," often because they had not updated their citizenship status with the Social Security Administration, the study said.

Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., a member of the Social Security subcommittee, said Congress must be careful to create a system that is non-discriminatory.

"None of us wants to see (E-Verify) turn into a Jim Crow system of apartheid," he said.