War and medical metaphors tend to dominate Washington parlance. For instance, partisans are constantly “attacking” someone else’s position or “defending” their own.

Sometimes, one side “inoculates” against an attack by doing something that is meant to neutralize the opposition’s argument.

On the eve of a hearing on employer verification that will kick off a renewed Capitol Hill focus on immigration policy, the Department of Homeland Security announced improvements to its electronic employer verification system on Monday, May 5.

The DHS program, known as E-Verify, has come under withering criticism from employers and HR organizations. The voluntary system, which has been in place since 1997 and now boasts 64,000 participating companies, checks information from I-9 forms against databases at the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration.

The Society for Human Resource Management and several other HR groups charge that E-Verify is inefficient, prone to error and incapable of being ramped up to handle traffic from all 6 million employers in the country. They cite statistics from a study showing that the Social Security database, upon which E-Verify relies, has a 4.1 percent error rate, which could amount to 6 million people being denied employment by mistake.

So, in typical Washington fashion, the DHS decides to inoculate against such criticism by unveiling two enhancements to the system the day before a Tuesday, May 6, House Ways & Means subcommittee hearing on employer verification.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), a division of the DHS, will add naturalization data to E-Verify in order to augment the Social Security databases. It also will allow nonconfirmed workers to resolve mismatches directly with the USCIS rather than going through the Social Security Administration.

“Naturalized citizens who have not yet updated their records with the Social Security Administration are the largest category of work-authorized persons who initially face an SSA mismatch in E-Verify,” the USCIS said in a statement.

The agency also said real-time arrival data from the border inspection system will be added to E-Verify in an effort to reduce mismatches for newly arrived workers.

The improvements are unlikely to assuage SHRM and the other members of the HR Initiative for a Legal Workforce. They are advocating a bill written by Sen. Sam Johnson, R-Texas and ranking member of the House Ways & Means Social Security subcommittee.

Johnson’s measure would mandate that employers submit information electronically only for new hires to the Social Security Administration through a child-support enforcement system already in place in each state.

Advocates for the bill say that about 90 percent of U.S. employers already use the so-called “dead-beat dad” system. The identity of prospective employees would be checked against Social Security and Department of Homeland Security databases. The procedure would eliminate the paper-based I-9 process.

Under the bill, employers would be given the option of signing up for a secure electronic verification system that uses a network of government-approved private contractors to conduct background checks of workers and collect biometric identifiers, such as fingerprints.

At the May 6 hearing, supporters of the Johnson bill will face off against champions of E-Verify. The meeting will launch House consideration of immigration proposals, many of which focus on enforcement.

The hearing series is an attempt by House Democratic leadership to satisfy conservative Democrats—and Republicans—who are pushing for a vote on bills that would crack down on illegal hiring.

Top House Democrats don’t want to allow enforcement measures to move forward without including bills to increase legal immigration and to allow a path toward naturalization for the 12 million illegal workers in the United States.

But the immigration logjam may have to be broken when it comes to E-Verify. The law that established the program expires in November. Congress has to either extend E-Verify or scrap it this year.