The hire package: A look at hiring forms | Employment | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy

This right over here is an image of an I9 form, which is one of the two forms which you will have to fill out when you take a new job. The other one is a W4. We talk about that in other videos. The W4 form is all about how much taxes the employer should withhold from every paycheck based on things that you fill out.

But the I9 here, this is crucial for the employer to be able to say, "Okay, I can hire you." It does two things: it verifies identity—who you are, or that you are who you say you are—and the other one is eligibility to work. You could verify your identity, but what if you actually aren't allowed to work in the United States?

Now, there's a bunch of forms here. At some point, they ask for documents, and you could either do list A or list B and list C. The general notion is when you fill out these forms, you should have documents—valid documents—that validate both your identity and your eligibility to work.

In terms of identity, it should be government issued, have a picture, and have personal information on it. So things that validate your identity, examples are a driver's license. It could be a military ID, a Native American tribal document, or it could be a passport. Passports are useful because they establish both your identity and your eligibility to work, because you won't get a passport unless you are eligible to work in the United States.

Now, if you only have, say, a driver's license, you still have to have some document that shows your eligibility to work. That could be—let me do that over here—not as organized as I'd like. This could be something like a birth certificate. You might say, "Why isn't that enough for even your identity?" Well, a birth certificate doesn't have a picture of you, so they don't know whether it's definitely your birth certificate.

But if you have, say, a driver's license, then they know who you are, and then you also have the birth certificate, and it shows that you were born in the United States. Well, then you would be eligible to work. It could also be a Social Security card, it could be a green card for residents, or it could be some type of work authorization card.

So the big picture here is when you see these forms, it's good to go in prepared, knowing that you're going to have to fill them out and to bring the supporting documents so that you don't get stuck or your employment doesn't have to get delayed in some way, shape, or form.