On December 12, 2008, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS) announced an interim final rule to modify the Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9. The new form will be effective 45 days from the date of the interim final rule. There are two major changes. The first is to limit the number of acceptable documents for verifying a new employee’s identity. The second is to prohibit accepting expired identification documents. Employers must complete and maintain the form for all employees hired after November 6, 1986. The new form should be available on the CIS website (http://www.uscis.gov/i-9) toward the end of January 2009.

Reduced Number of "List A" Acceptable Documents
The new I-9 form reduces the number of acceptable documents employees may provide to verify their authorization to work in the United States. The following documents are no longer acceptable as "List A" documents: Temporary Resident Card and older versions of the Employment Authorization Card/Document (Forms I-688, I-688A and I-688B). All of these documents, which no longer are issued, have expired.

New "List A" Documents Now Acceptable
Three new documents now are acceptable for List A:

  • Foreign passport containing a temporary I-551 printed notation on a machine-readable visa.
  • Passports together with a valid Form I-94 or Form I-94A showing admission as a nonimmigrant for citizens of the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands
  • U.S. Passport Card 

 New Attestation Provision in Section 1 of the Form I-9
As a minor modification, the new form also will allow the employee to attest to being either a citizen or non-citizen national of the United States. Non-citizen nationals of the United States are persons born in American Samoa, some former citizens of the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and some children of non-citizen nationals born abroad. The U.S. State Department has further information about non-citizen nationals on its web site at www.travel.state.gov.