Citing the immigration raids on Marshalltown’s Swift & Co. and Mississippi’s Howard Industries as evidence, Eric Bord, a partner in the Washington, D.C.-based Morgan Lewis law firm, said that the government-run E-Verify program has the “perverse effect of encouraging identity theft.”

“What [the raids] will do is focus employers on compliance in general, but E-Verify is an ineffective compliance tool because it doesn’t protect against identity theft,” Bord told reporter Mark Schoeff, Jr. of Workforce Management magazine.

Both Howard Industries and Swift & Co. used E-Verify, a government-run employment verification system, before the companies were targets of federal immigration raids.

The law that authorizes the E-Verify program is slated for expiration this fall. Although the U.S. House has approved a five-year extension of the program, the Senate has not yet considered reauthorization. The Department of Homeland Security, which has partnered with the Social Security Administration to manage E-Verify, is pushing for the now mostly voluntary program to become mandatory. The first step in that process is the approval of a regulation that would require all federal contractors to use the system.