E-Verify's v32 Update: Faster Enrollment and More Data on Every Case
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Indiana's FAIRNESS Act has been in effect since July 1, 2026, and it covers every employer with workers in the state. Senate Enrolled Act 76 makes it unlawful to knowingly or intentionally recruit, hire, or keep employing a worker who isn't authorized to work in the United States, and it lets the Indiana Attorney General go to court to suspend or revoke the licenses, permits, and registrations a business needs to operate in Indiana. There's no size threshold and no industry carve-out.
If you hire in Indiana, use E-Verify. The law doesn't order it by name, but it was written around it. An employer that confirmed a worker's eligibility through E-Verify isn't in violation, and nothing else in the statute gives you protection that clear. This guide covers what the law actually says, how enforcement works, what the Attorney General's office has said since July, and what to have in place now.
The FAIRNESS Act is Senate Enrolled Act 76, which Governor Mike Braun signed on March 5, 2026, and which took effect July 1, 2026. It adds a new chapter to the Indiana Code (IC 22-5-9) and creates the first state-level consequences in Indiana's history for employers who knowingly employ unauthorized workers. Federal law has banned that since 1986, but until now Indiana had no penalties of its own.
The law gives the Attorney General the power to investigate suspected violations and bring civil actions against employers, with court-ordered suspension or revocation of operating authority as the main penalty. For outside legal analysis, see coverage from Kahn, Dees, Donovan & Kahn and The Indiana Lawyer.
The statute defines an employer as any person, including an agent, that employs employees in Indiana, so the law applies the same way to every business with Indiana workers.
An employer violates the law if it knowingly or intentionally does any of three things.
The law doesn't reach hiring or employment that happened before July 1, 2026, but the "continue to employ" prohibition covers your current workforce from that date forward. Once you learn a current employee isn't authorized to work, whether through a reverification that can't be completed or another reliable indicator, you can't keep that person on payroll. The obligation runs through the whole employment relationship.
The "knowing or intentional" standard matters, because the law isn't strict liability, and an employer that follows good-faith verification practices and gets fooled by fraudulent documents isn't automatically in violation. At a July 2026 Indiana Chamber webinar, the Attorney General's office said the statute doesn't impose liability for inadvertent mistakes or isolated paperwork errors, and that proving a knowing or intentional violation comes first.
An employer isn't in violation if it used reasonable diligence to confirm a worker's eligibility before recruiting, hiring, or continuing to employ that person. The statute names two ways to do that.
E-Verify is the stronger of the two because it's specific and it leaves a record. An employer that runs a case on every new hire can show exactly what it checked and when, which is the evidence the safe harbor depends on. The exception is worth noticing too, since an E-Verify result doesn't protect an employer that had obvious reasons to doubt it.
The best-practices path is vaguer, though the Attorney General's office has said publicly that taking part in ICE's IMAGE program will satisfy it, according to the Indiana Chamber. The office also said in late July that it expected to publish formal employer guidance in early August, and we haven't seen it published as of late September. Until it is, an employer relying on "best practices" without E-Verify is asking the Attorney General to judge its process after the fact.
Our compliance team can review your current I-9 and E-Verify practices and walk you through what the FAIRNESS Act means for your situation. Schedule a free compliance call, with no obligation and no sales pitch.
The Attorney General is the only enforcer, and the statute builds in a notice step before any lawsuit against a first-time employer.
The notice and the 15-day clock are the moments that matter most. Get employment counsel involved as soon as either a civil investigative demand or a probable-cause notice arrives, because what you produce becomes the record the case is built on.
The act doesn't set a dollar fine. Its penalties go after the licenses, permits, registrations, and other operating authorizations a business uses in Indiana, and they escalate with each finding.
| Situation | What the court may order |
|---|---|
| A single violation, with no prior finding | Suspension of all operating authorizations at that location for 5 business days |
| More than one violation, with no prior finding | Suspension at the affected locations for 10 business days |
| Any violation after a prior finding | Suspension at the affected locations for 180 days |
| Any violation after a 180-day suspension | Permanent revocation at the affected locations |
| Willful violations at three or more locations, after a prior permanent revocation | Permanent revocation of all operating authorizations in Indiana |
| Any violation | Probation of 6 months to 2 years, with quarterly reports to the Attorney General on hiring practices, including employees' work-eligibility documentation and a signed affidavit |
An employer without a license specific to the location where the violation happened doesn't escape the penalty, because the court suspends or revokes the authorizations it uses elsewhere instead. The law also bars retaliation against an employee who talks to or cooperates with the Attorney General, and it has to be enforced without regard to race, color, or national origin.
State penalties come on top of federal ones. Federal I-9 paperwork violations run $288 to $2,861 per form, and knowing hires run up to $28,619 per worker under the current Federal Register adjustment. See our full breakdown of I-9 penalties in 2026.
Rokita kicked off the enforcement push on April 16, 2026, with a press event at the Signia by Hilton construction site in downtown Indianapolis alongside the Central Midwest Carpenters Union. He said his office had already received tips about employers, would go where the complaints led, and expected construction to be a key focus, though he didn't name any companies.
At the Indiana Chamber webinar on July 23, assistant chief deputy Blake Lanning said the office's enforcement would focus on intentional violators and not on employers making good-faith efforts to comply. We haven't seen any enforcement action under the act announced publicly as of late September 2026, but the law reaches violations from the past three years, so a quiet first quarter doesn't mean conduct since July 1 is out of reach.
The political coalition behind the law explains the focus. The Central Midwest Carpenters Union backed the FAIRNESS Act publicly, and its representatives framed it as a wage issue, since contractors that follow the law can't match the bids of contractors that don't. That puts construction contractors, subcontractors, and labor brokers in Indiana in a few predictable spots.
Contractors that already use E-Verify and keep their records in order start any of those conversations in a much stronger position.
Indiana gets to the same place as Florida and Georgia by a different route, making E-Verify the defense instead of the rule, and it's part of the same trend of states adding their own consequences on top of federal I-9 enforcement. Ohio's E-Verify Workforce Integrity Act (House Bill 246) took effect March 19, 2026, for nonresidential construction contractors, subcontractors, and labor brokers, with fines up to $25,000 and permanent license revocation for knowing violations (see our Ohio E-Verify construction mandate guide). Florida's SB 1718 has required E-Verify for private employers with 25 or more employees since July 2023, and Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah all require it for at least some employers.
The common thread is E-Verify as the way to comply, whether a state calls it a requirement or a safe harbor. For employers hiring in several states, that makes it the practical default. Our state-by-state guide, E-Verify Requirements by State (2026), has the details.
"Indiana is the latest, but it won't be the last. Every quarter we're watching another state pass employer-facing penalties, and construction always gets hit first," says Jed Butler, CEO of i9 Intelligence. "The employers who just make E-Verify part of how they onboard, period, stop having to track 50 state laws. They have one compliant process that works everywhere."
Enrollment at E-Verify.gov is free, and you'll need your company's legal name, EIN, and a program administrator. Each legal entity that hires employees enrolls separately, since a parent company's enrollment doesn't cover its subsidiaries. After that, create a case for every new employee no later than the third business day after they start work for pay, using the information from their completed Form I-9. You can't create a case until the person has accepted the job offer and completed Form I-9.
The "continue to employ" prohibition applies to the people already on your payroll, so an internal audit is the way to find problems before anyone else does. Look for these:
Don't run existing employees through E-Verify as part of the audit. Federal rules only allow that in narrow cases, like federal contractors covered by the E-Verify clause.
The safe harbor only helps if you can prove it, so keep records of these:
Decide now who opens a civil investigative demand or a probable-cause notice, who calls counsel, and who pulls the records. Fifteen business days goes quickly, and the evidence of reasonable diligence you'd submit is the documentation from Step 3.
Everyone involved in hiring needs to understand the law, including HR staff, hiring managers, construction project managers, and office administrators who handle onboarding. These are the mistakes we see most:
Complying with the FAIRNESS Act takes more than an E-Verify account, especially for multi-state employers, construction contractors with crews on job sites, and companies with a large existing workforce to audit. i9 Intelligence connects directly to E-Verify, so cases are created automatically from completed Form I-9 data without retyping anything or switching systems.
Indiana hires often start at job sites and field offices, far from a central HR desk. With remote verification, new hires complete Section 2 over a live video call with a trained i9 Intelligence authorized representative, from the job site or anywhere with a phone. Every I-9 and E-Verify case is stored electronically with reverification scheduled automatically, so expiring work authorization surfaces before it turns into a "continue to employ" problem, and every case result and TNC notice is ready to produce if the Attorney General's office comes asking.
To see how it works, book a demo, or use our I-9 Risk Calculator to estimate your current exposure.
Yes. Florida's E-Verify law only covers private employers with 25 or more employees, but Indiana's FAIRNESS Act has no size threshold, and a business with a single Indiana employee is covered.
Not by name, but treat it like it is. Using E-Verify counts as reasonable diligence under the FAIRNESS Act, which means an employer that verified a worker through it isn't in violation unless the circumstances should have made it doubt the result. The only other path is "industry standard best practices," which the statute doesn't define and the Attorney General hasn't explained yet.
The act itself doesn't set a dollar fine. Its penalties are court-ordered suspensions of an employer's Indiana operating authorizations, starting at 5 business days and escalating to permanent revocation, plus probation with quarterly reporting, and federal I-9 penalties still apply on top of that.
Form I-9 is required for every U.S. employer either way, and completing it correctly is the foundation. Whether I-9s alone count as "industry standard best practices" is an open question until the Attorney General publishes guidance, so E-Verify is the clearer way to get the safe harbor's protection.
Yes. The law covers employees working in Indiana regardless of where the employer is based, and a remote employee working from home in Indiana counts. Multi-state employers should know which remote employees are physically in Indiana and confirm edge cases with employment counsel.
The law doesn't reach hiring that happened before July 1, and you shouldn't run those employees through E-Verify now, since federal rules only allow that in narrow cases. The "continue to employ" prohibition does apply to them going forward, so learning that a current employee isn't authorized to work means you can't keep employing that person.
A PEO that runs E-Verify cases for your Indiana hires can support your reasonable-diligence showing, but it depends on which entity is treated as the employer for I-9 purposes. Put the arrangement in writing, confirm the PEO is enrolled and in good standing, and make sure you can produce the case records yourself if asked.
The act follows the employer-employee relationship, and Form I-9 and E-Verify apply to employees and not to properly classified independent contractors. The statute's definition of "employ" includes permitting someone to work, though, and a worker misclassified as a 1099 contractor can end up treated as an employee in an investigation, so the classification needs to hold up.
The statute focuses on the direct employer, so a general contractor isn't automatically liable for a subcontractor's hiring. The subcontractor has its own exposure, and general contractors whose subs run into trouble should expect questions about how they vet them. Adding E-Verify enrollment to subcontractor prequalification is a simple way to reduce that risk.
An employer with no prior finding or affidavit gets written notice of the probable-cause determination before any lawsuit, and then has 15 business days to show evidence of reasonable diligence or file a corrective affidavit. Either one stops the Attorney General from suing. Call employment counsel the day the notice arrives.
The law has been enforceable since July 1, 2026, and the Attorney General's office has said it's receiving tips and will act on credible complaints and information from federal partners. We haven't seen a public enforcement action as of late September 2026, but the Attorney General can act on violations from the past three years.
Updated September 29, 2026, to reflect the law in effect and the enrolled text of SEA 76, including its penalty structure.
Need help with Indiana FAIRNESS Act compliance? Call (713) 668-6200 (Mon–Fri, 8 AM – 5 PM CT), email support@i-9intelligence.com, or submit a support ticket.