Household hires held up Bersin confirmation
Alan Bersin seemed the type of person who would sail through to confirmation as commissioner of Customs and Border Protection.
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He already had experience on one of the job’s biggest responsibilities — managing immigration enforcement and border issues with Mexico in his capacity as Southwest border czar for the Clinton administration, and then in a similar capacity as the Obama administration’s special representative for border affairs in the Department of Homeland Security. He was a former superintendent of the San Diego school system and secretary of education in California.
So what took the Senate Finance Committee so long to review his background without scheduling a confirmation hearing that President Obama last weekend appointed Bersin to office while Congress was in recess?
The first clue came in a press release on Saturday in which Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, complained the White House bypassed the Senate’s advise-and-consent role on nominees, even before the committee of jurisdiction had voted on the candidate. Grassley’s office said Bersin was still in the process of trying to resolve conflicting information related to documentation and disclosure of various household employees.
Bersin’s problem was that he did not fill out I-9 forms from U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services that is used by an employer to verify an employee’s identity and to establish that the worker is eligible to accept employment in the United States, DHS spokesman Matt Chandler said in a statement provided to AmericanShipper.com.
‘Mr. Bersin and his wife verified the legal eligibility to work in the United States for each of their household employees prior to hiring. They did this by examining and recording information from passports, Social Security cards and other identifying documents. Mr. Bersin has never hired someone who was ineligible to work in the United States. Mr. Bersin has paid all applicable employment taxes for each person hired to work in his household, whether or not that person was technically an employee or an independent contractor,’ the statement said.
It added that the CBP commissioner did not fill out the I-9 forms because he did not know they were required for people working in his household and ‘regrets this error.’
The situation raises questions about how someone who has been in the trenches combating illegal immigration and making sure employers do not hire unauthorized workers could make such a mistake. As CBP commissioner Bersin is in charge of the Border Patrol and Customs officers at ports of entry, both of which are tasked with helping prevent illegal entry of aliens into the country.
Bersin’s confirmation became more difficult after the high-profile nominations early in the Obama administration were derailed by transgressions in their background. Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to be Health and Human Services secretary for failing to pay about $140,000 in back taxes, Nancy Killifer, Obama’s nominee to be chief performance officer, did the same following the disclosure that she paid a $950 lien for failure to pay property taxes. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson gave up as Commerce secretary over questions about letting state contracts. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had to pay back more than $40,000 in unpaid taxes before he was confirmed by the Senate.
Meanwhile, two Obama picks to head the Transportation Security Administration have pulled out of the process. Erroll Southers returned to work as a top security official at Los Angeles World Airports after it was revealed that he improperly used his FBI position to run a background check on a personal nemesis and Robert A. Harding withdrew last week after questions were raised about contracts his former company had with the Defense Department. ‘ Eric Kulisch