A similar performance in 1997-2001, however, would have landed IFCO's pallet division only in the bottom half of the SSA inspector general's Top 100. Seventy-five employers on that list averaged more bad W-2s per year than the approximately 3,097 filed by IFCO in 2005. Twenty-five filed percentages of bad W-2s higher than IFCO's 53.4 percent.
The unnamed California employer that ranked 13th, for example, filed 39,171 bad W-2s over five years (an average of 7,834 per year), or 78.38 percent of its total.
The Illinois employer that ranked first filed 131,991 bad W-2s (26,398 per year), or 11.68 percent of all its W-2s. It reported paying more than half a billion in wages on bad W-2s over five years.
One employer in the "Top 100" was a state government agency. The inspector general's report also mentioned a security guard service that submitted 8,902 W-2s in 2001, of which 4,321 were bad.
I asked the inspector general's office last June for the name of the security guard company and, in October, for the name of the state government agency. Each time, I was given the same answer: Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code prevents the SSA not only from giving the public the names of these employers, but it also prevents SSA from giving their names to the Department of Homeland Security (outside the context of an ongoing criminal investigation).
In his press conference about the IFCO case, Chertoff said he was asking Congress for "carefully crafted access to Social Security no-match data, so that we can detect those employers who are systematically employing workers despite the fact that there's an obvious mismatch between the names and the Social Security numbers in question."
Senate Finance Chairman Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, has inserted language into the Senate immigration reform bill that would require SSA to hand over to Homeland Security its annual list of all employers who file 100 or more bad W-2s.
No matter what else the Senate does this year on immigration, this provision should be made law.
Chertoff's agents should sharpen their harpoons. Whale season may be coming.