Since I started reporting on the Legal Arizona Workers Act (a.k.a. the employer sanctions law) I have heard from small businesses who wanted to tell me the system stinks without getting their name in the paper. Can’t blame ‘em. Here are two examples:

• A woman who called me this morning identified herself as a bookkeeper at a small business that until recently had been struggling. The business recovered and now has a need to hire a few new workers. A business of this size doesn’t have a personnel department, of course. So Mrs. Bookkeeper signed up for E-Verify, but no part of the process was simple, she said.
She started to take the required tutorial and test, but each time the phone rang and took her away from her computer, the program timed out and took her back to the registration screen. After wasting a bunch of time doing this over and over, she called a hotline, jumped through hoops and eventually got through to someone who told her that she passed the test. Well, she never finished the test, but the person just passed her through somehow.
Now, Mrs. Bookkeeper tells me, she’s getting wrong results for new hires who are U.S. citizens.

• Here’s an e-mail I received in January from another small-business owner. I’m leaving his name off because I haven’t received permission to print it.
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Have you tried using the E-verify system? It’s not as simple as you think. For small companies trying to comply with the law E-verify is too time consuming. To register with E-verify you have to read several pages of mundane information and take a test which needs to be passed before using the system.
Try registering for the system and let me know what you think. For Big Business it might not be a problem since they can assign one person to register and administer the system. But for a small company whose employees need to multi task as it is the time required to read the material is excessive.
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Sounds like Homeland Security needs to come up with a pause button for the program so that a small business can take its time getting through the long registration process.