Form I-9

But we haven't seen as much until recently a lot of workforce and workplace ICE enforcement activities.

And so we haven't seen a lot of I-9 audits.

But we wanted to get ahead of that by passing a policy at the city level here in Santa Fe, ensuring that we can't tell employers, don't follow the law.

What we can say is if there is an ICE enforcement activity, you need to notify your workers within 24 hours so that they can make some decisions about their lives, talk to their attorneys.

It's a whole nother show about how expensive housing is, but You know, the raids have happened.

They are raids.

These are not I-9 audits.

They don't appear to be targeted.

If you do, the repercussions are just immense.

So having someone that you can trust and partner with on things like verifications, right? I-9 is probably the biggest thing that you think about in HR.

And it's incredibly complex.

It shouldn't be.

mean, I guess, but like I got, like I said, three times as much as I got last year using H&R Block and I paid $450 out of it for that because mine is not simple simply because I do have a second job that's not with my school district.

And so was that an I-9? I have an I-9.

And then I do have to drive quite a bit.

So I always am like, can I just break even? and I that's what my goal was and then when I got this amount so I'm like okay one of my things was because I already helped pay for the hotels like I was like okay I have money let's do it now you know and but I was like I wanted to have money that I could put like be like okay I can do that plus I want us to go when we go into the tents and like I want to find that same

Our shiny rep and warranty policy has exclusions and we have specific indemnities and everyone's kind of grumpy at that outcome.

Or the answer is some flavor of, well, we've never had a problem there, but we can't produce any diligence to show that we've complied with the 1094, 1095 filings, or we have a robust I-9 onboarding process, or yes, we can confirm everybody is properly exempt versus non-exempt classified or independent contract versus employee classified.

And the result of that failure to produce affirmative proof is that the rep and warranty insurer gives us another exclusion and we have to ask for another specific indemnity.

And all of a sudden we've landed at a spot where we kind of have grumpy sellers.

Maybe that's tolerable because we're at the finish line at that stage, but it sure feels bumpy when we're trying to land the deal.

There's always a scramble to fight those exclusions and to produce more diligence, et cetera.

Whereas, you know, again, without RWI in the picture, you just kind of get a buyer and a seller who might be able to more quickly come to resolution on those types of risk areas, et cetera, that, you know, on I-9s, you've got to think about them.

But as an example, you know, not a huge driver of why you're doing the deal in the first place.

If you work as a gig economy, long story short, you don't fill out a W-2 for the most part.

You have to self-report income with like an I-9.

And when you self-report income, that grabs you back into the system that guarantees you Social Security withdrawals, that guarantees you annuities, that guarantees you protections under the federal government that if you don't report – And you take that for granted when you work for a big company where they do that for you.

You just fill out that paper and they, you know, they garnish your wage for, you know, incentive programs and everything.