Axion has been engaged by a Fortune 1000 company to perform data entry of information extracted from The Department of Homeland Security Form I-9, which is intended to document the eligibility of a person to be legally employed in the U.S. It asks for the person’s name, address, date of birth, Social Security Account Number, phone number and email address. The prospective employee must provide specific types of documents to support their identity, and information for those documents is also recorded on the I-9 Form, for example, driver’s license number and expiration date, passport number, etc.
Due to the sensitive nature of the data, the client asked that we design a program that would prevent a single data entry operator from viewing all the Personal Identifiable Information (PII) on a single form. In response, Axion created three separate programs, each one displaying only a portion of the PII from the scanned image and each program assigned to a separate team of data entry operators.
Also, because accuracy was so critical on this project, for each of the three programs, the information is keyed twice by two separate teams, and any differences identified by our system are then reviewed by a supervisor who determines the proper value. Thus, each form is processed by six independent teams and three to six supervisors.
Since the form’s introduction in 1987, there have been 16 revisions and 7 major format changes. Until 2013, the I-9 was a single-page document, thereafter it has been a 2-page document. Axion had to develop a program to accommodate all 7 formats. Furthermore, the client established a lengthy set of complex rules to specify proper handling of exception situations frequently encountered. To the greatest extent possible, Axion built programmed procedures into the data entry program to handle such exceptions; otherwise, it is up to the data entry operators and supervisors know and properly apply the rules.
To date, Axion has processed over 2 million I-9 forms.
