Signing and Management of Employment Eligibility (I-9) Forms Made Easy

eMudhra takes the complexity out of managing, signing and storing Employment Eligibility Verification Forms, also known as I-9 forms, for a leading IT company operating in the US.

The current process of completing Section 1 and Section 2 of the Form I-9 was very complicated, paper intensive and time-consuming. To complete Section 1, the newly hired employee had to take a print out of the I-9 form, manually fill in all the details, attest all the supporting documents, and physically add a signature in all the pages of the I-9 form as well as the supporting documents. To make matters worse, they had to complete the entire process within the first day of joining the new job. Same was the case with the HR department of the IT company. They only had three days to thoroughly verify all the details presented by the employee, manually fill Section 2 of the I-9 form as per the details provided by the employee and add signatures in all the pages of the form to validate their authenticity. Also the fact that they had to deploy additional resources to scan and upload documents into the electronic employment confirmation system — E-Verify — operated by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to run employment eligibility checks was not helping the cause.

The IT company wanted to take the complexity out of this process by digitizing the entire process and providing provisions to electronically sign all the documents using US eSign Act complaint e-signatures (both with regards to the newly hired employee and the HR department of the employer).

Business Needs

The IT company wanted to digitalize the entire process of filling, signing and management of Employment Eligibility Verification Form (the I-9 form), including collecting, signing and storing of all the supporting documents that establish both identity and employment eligibility in the country.

Approach

• Deploy a Enterprise CA for issuing legally valid electronic signatures
• Digitize all the workflows and include provisions to electronically sign documents
• Securely store and manage all the I-9 forms

The Result

• Seamlessly issue legally valid e-Signatures to all concerned parties
• Completely eliminate paper trail and streamline workflow
• Allow all the concerned parties to add legally compliant signature to documents with the click of the button
• Increased compliance by including provisions to securely store and manage all the digitalized I-9 forms

Solution

Leveraging their expertise and experience, eMudhra devised a two-step process to help the IT company achieve their objective. The first part involved setting up of a Enterprise CA for issuing US eSign Act complaint e-Signatures when a Create or Generate Signature request is raised by the newly hired employee or the HR department of the company. eMudhra used their proprietary PKI solution, emCA, for this process and stored all the generated e-Signatures in a secure DB for later use.

The second part involved digitalizing the entire workflow and including provisions to sign documents using electronic signatures generated in the above process. emSigner, eMudhra’s new age paperless solution, met this need to the tee. Using this innovative paperless office solution, the IT company was able to seamlessly digitize all the documents and enable the newly-hired employees as well as the HR team to not only add legally valid e-Signatures but also time-stamp all the documents without any fuss. The same paperless platform was used for secure storage and management of I-9 form of all the employees as per USCIS norms.

The solution that we provided included following broad modules:

• Certificate Lifecycle Management Module
  • a. Certificate Issuance – To manage the issuance, revocation of e-Signatures
  • b. Certificate Download – For downloading e-Signatures from Enterprise CA as a soft token
  • c. Certificate Registration – To allow the customer to register their e-Signature on the client application
• emSigner – On-premise Digital Signature enabled workflow management solution used for defining paperless workflows
• Time Stamping Server – To provide a reliable time source for e-Signatures
• Hardware Security Module – FIPS 140-2 level 3 certified physical computing devices that safeguards and manages digital keys for strong authentication and provides crypto processing