Starting January 1, 2015, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will start purging the E-Verify records of employers that are 10 years old or more. This initiative is in accordance with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records retention and disposal requirements which mandate that USCIS dispose of E-Verify records after 10 years.

In response to the NARA records retention requirements, USCIS has put in place a process that will allow employers to download a “Historical Records Report” to capture E-Verify records created on or before December 31, 2004. This report will only extract E-Verify data for employers that were using the system during that period of time. The report will be available to affected employers from October 1, 2014 to December 31, 2014 only. After this date, employers will no longer have access to this information.  Guidance for downloading a report is available here.

In response to this USCIS initiative, Employers should deploy an E-Verify record retention policy that addresses the annual purge that USCIS will now conduct of E-Verify records. This policy should include a requirement that all I-9 forms contain an annotation of the relevant E-Verify transaction number.