Local county Supervisor Michael Antonovich wants to consider using a controversial system to weed out undocumented workers from companies that contract with Los Angeles County. But on Tuesday, fellow supervisors hit the brakes on the issue.

They said at the Board of Supervisors meeting that the E-Verify system would unfairly target minorities, and the county’s top lawyer said it could lead to lawsuits.

The county’s five-member governing board will revisit the issue in three months.

“What you are going to see is a targeted group, especially those with foreign names, that are going to be targeted by E-Verify,” said Supervisor Gloria Molina, who was backed by Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

Antonovich, whose district includes the Santa Clarita Valley, had proposed having county officials prepare a report that would weigh the merits of the program.

His motion on Tuesday would have cleared the way for the county to force businesses that contract with the county to use the system. Instead, the board approved a 90-day internal review of E-Verify’s effectiveness.

Saving tax dollars
Antonovich has argued the program would keep tax dollars from going to pay undocumented immigrants.

However, inaccuracies in E-Verify reports have made the program the target of immigrant rights groups. The software is designed to check whether a person is eligible to work in the U.S., but sometimes wrongly flags naturalized citizens as not qualified for work in the country.

The mistakes in the E-Verify reports have prompted a lawsuit elsewhere in the nation, which has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Antonovich’s spokesman said it’s worthwhile to consider a system that could save result in saving taxpayer dollars and level the playing field for businesses that follow the law.

“Not enforcing the law incentivizes illegal immigration, which costs the county taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually,” spokesman Tony Bell wrote in an e-mail.

“It also protects the businesses that do follow the law, which may otherwise be driven out of business, especially in these tough economic times, by businesses that charge less for services by exploiting illegal immigrants.”

During Tuesday’s meeting, Antonovich defended his motion, saying the E-Verify system is used by numerous employers, including the county.

Taking a closer look
However, Molina said the county hasn’t measured its own level of success with the program and should not ask businesses to use what could be a severely flawed system.  

“We use E-Verify and we never evaluated how much it costs. We never evaluated how many times (the county) gets false reports,” she said.

Interim Los Angeles County Counsel Robert Kalunian said adopting the system could expose the county to lawsuits for those erroneously disqualified from employment.

Molina put a motion on the floor to examine E-Verify for another 90 days and conduct an internal audit of the county’s success rate with the program.

The motion, which passed unanimously, will also review the legal ramifications of making vendors use E-Verify.

Antonovich’s staff said the report from the county executive ranked the risk of lawsuits filed against the county by flaws in the E-Verify system as low.

“The additional information due in 90 days will shed more light on this point,” Bell said in an e-mail.