You may have heard about a problem with pre-populating Section 1 of the Form I-9 — ignore it!There seems to be some confusion among our esteemed policy-making agencies about the issue of whether it is legal or not legal to pre-populate Section 1 of the Form I-9:Immigration Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (“USCIS”) have provided inconsistent statements. Earlier this year, ICE stated at an American Immigration Lawyers Association meeting that it deemed pre-populating Section 1 a violation of I-9 regulations. However, more recently, both ICE and USCIS stated that they have no official position regarding pre-population and advised employers to follow the regulations (which are silent on the issue). An official guidance or policy from either agency has yet to appear.[1]We will keep you posted but at this point it doesn’t appear necessary to make changes to current systems that gather new hire information for completing the I-9.

[1] Jackson-Lewis; September 3, 2013; http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=c30ddd60-2912-4fc4-9516-435757d15462