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For the second year in a row, Utah lawmakers this month voted down a bill that would have required more prospective employers to use E-Verify, which confirms a potential worker’s citizenship status.

The rejection, lawmakers say, is because the federal system “just doesn’t work.”

For decades, the state required employers with at least 15 employees to use the web-based system, but lawmakers loosened that to 150 for private companies in 2022. Public employers and public contractors must verify the status of all new employees.

A bill that would have changed the number back to 15 failed in committee last year, even after bumping the number up to 50. Its rejection came after concerns it would affect the construction workforce and Utah’s push to build more housing.

This year, HB294 initially would have lowered the threshold to 50. That number changed twice — first to 100, then to 125, both times by amendment in committee.

Rep. Tiara Auxier proposed the bill as a move in the right direction without “such a dramatic shift” as last year’s attempt.

The Morgan Republican said she saw the need for E-Verify in her first job out of college as an accountant at a construction company, where she said she ran Social Security numbers and found several names that didn’t match.

“It wasn’t just people coming here undocumented and working here undocumented,” Auxier said. “It was stealing people’s identities so that they were able to work.”

People target children’s Social Security numbers, she said, and those can’t be frozen for employment until someone is 16.

The bill passed the same House committee that previously voted it down after groups that opposed the measure during last year’s session didn’t come to testify either way.

Rep. Hoang Nguyen, D-Salt Lake City, said that wasn’t for a lack of opposition. In her conversations with trade associations, she said, “a lot of them said [that], out of respect, they would not come speak against it,” but they didn’t want to see the number change from 150.

“When you speak to business owners, they are saying they are having a heck of a time right now trying to find employees,” she said.

Craig Madsen, the CEO of Lehi-based J&M Steel, said even lowering to 100 employees would affect a lot of industries.

“I don’t think this does what we’re thinking it’ll do,” he told the committee. “There’s jobs in construction, in farming, in hospitality that just will not be filled.”

But that wasn’t the reason it failed in a Senate committee, where two Republicans joined the Democratic members in voting not to recommend the bill to the full Senate.

Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, didn’t talk about his vote during committee but said during a media availability with leadership that, based on his experience, E-Verify doesn’t work well, and it didn’t make sense to require more people to use it.

“If it worked, it’d be great, but there have been so many times that I’ve heard people just say it just doesn’t work, and so I don’t think there’s any reason to tie any more to it,” Sandall said.

Sen. Jen Plumb brought up a similar concern in committee, expressing “limited faith” in E-Verify.

Plumb, a Salt Lake City Democrat, approved adjusting the threshold to 125 but said the online system still “is so flawed that I think we should give serious pause to actually moving this forward.”

Salt Lake Tribune staff writer Emily Anderson Stern contributed to this story.