Modernizing employment eligibility verification
Summary
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) E-Verify system is used by employers to confirm the eligibility of their employees to work in the U.S. As part of USCIS’ efforts to modernize E-Verify, we engaged as a subcontractor to Excella and provided API design and technical expertise that contributed to the successful relaunch of the system, despite the complexity of the existing legacy environment.
The challenge
Several years ago, USCIS undertook a massive initiative to modernize their E-Verify system in order to improve the overall user experience. A major challenge with this modernization has been the need to maintain and integrate with a myriad of legacy systems, while simultaneously building out and optimizing the new system.
The solution
As a subcontractor to Excella, we helped address both the modernization and relaunch efforts, as well as legacy integration and modernization, using digital delivery practices. Some of our major contributions included:
- Replacing existing services with new frameworks written in modern languages and deployed to the cloud
- Enhancing the efficiency of the system’s query and information usage by rewriting the data-retrieval code in the object-relational mapping layer
- Improving performance of the case data ingestion pipeline by reconfiguring the underlying architecture of the system’s data loading process, as well as upgrading the clustering hardware responsible for managing the loading
- Creating an API-based microservice in order to simulate the behavior of a Social Security Administration system, which was needed for third-party API integration testing
The results
- Helped relaunch E-Verify in April of 2018
- Migrated 225 million historical cases into the Elasticsearch datastore for efficient, fast-searching capability
- Improved the speed of verification for over 800,000 enrolled employers