Wage workers generally have taxes withheld involuntarily, at least unless someone makes them manually override it.
Interestingly, that seems to trigger the taxman to start looking, which is when folks get busted. It’s in some mentioned anecdotes and articles here.
Even more interesting? If they instead just abandon the withheld taxes, no one seems interested in actually fixing the problem.
It would be trivial to mandate employers do realtime submissions of the employment eligibility paperwork for instance, but it’s actually illegal to send it to anyone, or attempt to do anything more with that information (like have a service somewhere that tracks these things and notifies employers of obviously invalid cases like a SSN being used across 5 states for 50 different job applications at different employers at once).
A cynical person would say it’s because as long as the people who need to be paid are getting paid, unskilled labor is cheap and easy to scare/boss around, illegal immigration is not actually a problem, but an opportunity for them.
Interestingly, that seems to trigger the taxman to start looking, which is when folks get busted. It’s in some mentioned anecdotes and articles here.
Even more interesting? If they instead just abandon the withheld taxes, no one seems interested in actually fixing the problem.
It would be trivial to mandate employers do realtime submissions of the employment eligibility paperwork for instance, but it’s actually illegal to send it to anyone, or attempt to do anything more with that information (like have a service somewhere that tracks these things and notifies employers of obviously invalid cases like a SSN being used across 5 states for 50 different job applications at different employers at once).
A cynical person would say it’s because as long as the people who need to be paid are getting paid, unskilled labor is cheap and easy to scare/boss around, illegal immigration is not actually a problem, but an opportunity for them.