The Aspen Valley Hospital, one of the Roaring Fork Valley’s largest employers, is in the process of enrolling in E-Verify, a program requiring that the Social Security numbers of new employees be checked against a federal database.
Enrollment in the program could make it harder for the hospital to find qualified employees.
Aspen Valley Hospital’s pending enrollment in the E-Verify program is being triggered, in part, from the renewal of a contract between the hospital and Pitkin County for the hospital to provide meals for inmates at the county jail.
“We are actually in that process right now,” said Ginny Dyche, spokesperson for Aspen Valley Hospital, about enrolling in E-Verify. “We will be enrolled by April 1, so by the time the county approves the contract, we will be enrolled.”
Colorado’s Illegal Alien Law, passed in 2006, requires that any organization that contracts with a local government to provide services must certify that it does not use illegal labor and that it has enrolled in E-Verify, which is jointly run by the Social Security Administration and Homeland Security.
Aspen Valley Hospital has been including such a provision in its contracts with companies that provide services to the hospital since late 2006, but now, because the hospital is renewing a contract with the county, it too must enroll in E-Verify.
The hospital is in the process of finalizing a new two-year contract to provide meals to the prisoners in the Pitkin County Jail, which it has been doing for over 20 years.
The hospital’s cafeteria provides meals for hospital patients, and also has the capability to also provide meals to the county jail, which does not have a kitchen. The hospital charges the county $18.92 a day for breakfast, lunch and dinner for an inmate.
Dyche said the hospital has been consulting with Mountain States Employment Council for some time about the E-Verify program, which does have its flaws.
For example, some employees with valid Social Security numbers have been found by the E-Verify database not to be eligible for employment. One reason is that some valid workers are not yet in the E-Verify database because of the time it can take for information to travel from one federal agency to another.
But the bugs in the system are being worked out and over 50,000 companies in the country have now enrolled in E-Verify, including large local companies such as Elam Construction and Gould Construction.
“They have recently said we should go ahead and enroll,” said Dyche, about the Employment Council’s advice.
But the pending contract to provide meals to inmates in the county jail has also spurred the hospital to enroll in E-Verify.
“We are, again, assuming that the county will include that language in the contract,” said Dyche.
A draft of the contract between the hospital and the county was approved last week at first reading by the Pitkin County commissioners, but the contract did not include the language required by the Colorado Illegal Aliens Law.
When the oversight was brought to the attention this week of Pitkin County Attorney John Ely, he said the contract would be corrected.
“We’ll have to fix that,” Ely said this week.
The contract is in the form of an intergovernmental agreement but is still covered by state law.
“I think it is the same as any other contract,” said Pitkin County Attorney John Ely. “It binds us to treat the contract the way it should be treated. And it binds the hospital as the contracting party to go through the steps required — whether it is E-Verify or whatever the system is — they have to go through the steps. And if they don’t, they are kind of hanging out there.”
The hospital has the equivalent of 250 full-time employees, and hires between 50 and 75 new employees a year, but one hospital official didn’t see that E-Verify would make it harder to find qualified employees.
“I don’t foresee that there will be any impact,” said Elaine Gerson, the hospital’s attorney, about the hospital’s ability to hire legal employees. “We’ve had a very tight hiring system in place for some time.”
Other local employers, however, have said their experience with E-Verify has shown that some recently hired employees are not, in fact, eligible to work in this country, despite the fact the employee presented flawless looking identification and employment documents.
A recent review by the Aspen Daily News of a number of local government contracts entered into since the law took effect in August 2006 showed that the required language from the Colorado Illegal Aliens Law was missing from a number of local contracts.
Attorneys for Pitkin County, the city of Aspen and the Town of Snowmass Village said the missing provision in some contracts was a bureaucratic oversight and not a deliberate attempt to skirt the law.
Colorado is one a handful of states in the United States that have passed such a law. Arizona is the only state in the nation to make it mandatory for all businesses to enroll in E-Verify.
Colorado’s law requires a government contractor to verify the Social Security numbers of all new hires through the federal database program.
The verification process is seen as being one step beyond the “reasonable documents” standard that most businesses use to hire employees.
Under that standard, an employer has to accept employment verification documents from a prospective employee if they look reasonably valid.
The penalties for not complying with the state law are relatively light, but could have some consequences.
First, if a contractor does not enroll in E-Verify as required, the governmental entity could declare that the contract in question is breached, or invalid.
If a government does declare a contract invalid, it must then report the contractor to the Colorado Secretary of State’s office, which is then required to place the non-compliant company on an online list for two years.
So far, no companies in Colorado have been put on the list.
bgs@aspendailynews.com
