There’s one piece of paper that could cost your restaurant thousands of dollars—but there is help at hand.
The I-9 is one of the scariest things for restaurant operators, rating up there with foodborne illness, fire, and poor reviews. The single-page form even has a 70-page accompanying booklet containing advice for its completion.
In use since the 1980s, an I-9 form is required for every single staff member as proof of his or her employment eligibility. But since President Obama came to power, the number of restaurant audits has increased exponentially and operators are being charged thousands of dollars due to forms that are incorrectly or insufficiently completed.
“It’s probably the single most challenging form to complete in the U.S. and a lot of it is unavoidable because of all the variants of immigration status and illegal work status,” says Blake Helppie, CEO of JobApp, a subscription-based automated phone and web-based hourly hiring service based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Audits of restaurants have increased by 500 percent in the past five years, Helppie points out.
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now announces to restaurants that it will conduct an audit and the business then has three days to produce I-9s for every employee and every single staff member who has previously worked for the company.
ICE will go through every form and make sure it’s properly filled out, says Helppie. “There are 185 items that can be incorrect on that one form. What we’ve found in the restaurant industry is that about 60 percent of paper I-9s that are filled out contain material errors.”
And with fines ranging from $110 to $1,100 per incorrect form, total fines for restaurants can be hefty. In fact, Helppie points out, ICE audited around 3,000 businesses in the past year and when fines were involved the average fine was $100,000.
There are two things that make the I-9 process easier for employees. First, the government has provided detailed guidelines about electronic I-9s. Employers using these can ensure compliance because every aspect of the form is validated.
The problem with electronic forms is they don’t address all the forms that have already been incorrectly completed and are now sitting in a restaurant’s filing cabinet.
But four months ago, JobApp released a new program, Retro9 , which will take paper I-9s , digitize them, check them for errors, validate them, then point out all errors to be corrected.
While there’s a cost to this, it’s a fraction of the cost of a government fine—it’s even a fraction of what a lawyer would charge to check these forms.
So far Retro9 has handled a restaurant chain so large it had around 15,000 I-9s, but it’s also seeing interest from independent operators.
Many employers who are filing in the paperwork as requested miss small details that could result in a fine large enough to close them down.
Going retro can be a way to solve that.
By Amanda Baltazar
