Kept In Suspense.(ISSUES & INSIGHTS)(EDITORIALS)(Editorial)

Illegal Immigration: When he signed the Homeland Security spending bill, President Bush said: "If somebody's here illegally, we've got to do everything we can to find them." Try looking in Social Security records.

The president also asked Congress to couple a guest-worker program with increased border security to deal with the rising tide of illegal immigration. "Our goal is clear -- to return every single illegal entrant, with no exceptions," he said. "We've got to crack down on employers who flout our laws."

That shouldn't be hard. A good way to crack down on those employers who hire illegal aliens, which include government agencies and their contractors, is to take a look at the literally millions of W2s that are filed with Social Security numbers that do not match Social Security Administration records.

Each year the SSA takes the Social Security taxes reported using Social Security numbers that have never been issued by the government and places the money in what is called an Earnings Suspense File. We're talking about millions of W2s and billions of dollars.

An October 2004 report from the SSA's inspector general examined the records of the 100 companies issuing the most W2s from 1997-2001 on which either names and/or numbers did not match SSA records. It found that just these 100 firms collectively filed more than 2.7 million of these bogus W2s, reporting $9.6 billion in wages for workers with bad numbers.

The report doesn't name the companies, but we know who they are and some of them redefine the phrase "repeat offender." Topping the list was an Illinois firm that from 1997-2001 filed 131,991 of these W2s totaling $524.9 million in wages. No. 2 was ...