Trua I-9 — SHRM 2026, Booth #1020

The real pain

Your HR team's day isn't I-9 paperwork. It's cleaning up confusion.

Every new hire asks the same four questions. Most platforms don't answer them. So HR fields panicked DMs on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. That's the job we're trying to remove.

1

"Which document should I bring?"

Our wallet shows them pictures of every accepted document, in plain English (and Spanish), before they ask.

2

"Did I do it right?"

After every step: "✓ Looks good. Document type: U.S. passport. Expires 2031. Next: a quick selfie."

3

"Why was I rejected?"

Human-readable reasons, not error codes. "The photo was too blurry. Try again in better light?" Plus a retry button.

4

"What happens next?"

Every screen previews the next step + how long it takes. A persistent journey banner shows where they are in the overall arc.

Most I-9 tools are built for HR. Ours is built for the employee. That's why HR teams stop fielding panicked DMs.

Audit anxiety

"I can sleep at night."

Every HR leader running I-9 carries a low-grade fear: "what if ICE knocks tomorrow?" Most tools don't make that fear go away — they just produce more paperwork to be afraid of. We close the loop.

Automated audit trails

Every form-state transition writes a tamper-evident audit row. Export the full chain as CSV or JSON in two clicks. Inspectors verify it offline.

Completeness checks

Section 2 SLA tracking, missing-signature flags, expired work-auth detection. The dashboard tells you what needs attention — before an inspector finds it.

Retention management

Federal retention rules (later of: 3 years after hire OR 1 year after termination) built into the engine. Legal holds, purge-eligible queue, audit-friendly retention reports.

Remediation workflows

When something needs fixing — re-verify, re-sign, re-attest — the wallet sends the employee a magic link. No emails, no phone tag, no chasing.

Audit-ready. Today. And tomorrow.

Decision support

"Tell me when I need to care."

Most HR professionals aren't immigration attorneys — and they shouldn't have to read 8 CFR §274a to do their job. We translate regulation into plain language, surface risk before it becomes a problem, and tell you exactly what to do next.

96%

Audit-ready score

A single number on your dashboard. What's keeping you from 100% is shown in plain language — never legal citations.

3

Risk indicators

"Three work-auth documents expire within 90 days." Not "§274a.2(b)(1)(vii)." You see the risk; we tell you the fix.

↗

Guided decisions

Exception flows walk you through what to do — in plain English. "This employee's work permit expired. Do you want to send them a re-verification link?"

You'll never see "regulations require…" in our UI. You'll see "here's what to do, and how long it takes."

Three journeys, one form

One Form I-9. Three people seeing it differently.

Every I-9 vendor pitches one perspective — the HR queue. We built for all three. Watch what Sarah, Marcus, and Jane each experience from the same record, and ask yourself if any other vendor can show you this.

The new hire

Sarah

Day 1 anxiety → confident, accompanied

Friday afternoon — gets an email from her future employer. Plain language, no jargon, opens on her phone.
Monday morning — taps the link. Sees her wallet build step-by-step: identity, document, confirmation. No federal codes, no "List A/B/C" jargon, illustrated docs, Spanish if she needs it.
One selfie + one ID photo — identity verified to federal standard. The wallet tells her exactly what's next.
Done in 12 minutes. She knows what happens next, when, and what to do if something goes sideways.
Next employer — she presents the same credential. No starting over. Her credential, not theirs.

Other vendors give Sarah a 1995 web form. We gave her a phone, a wallet, and plain English.

HR Operations

Marcus

Queue stress → "I can sleep at night"

Monday 8 am — opens his dashboard. Audit-ready score: 91%. Sparkline shows the curve bending up over 90 days. He can see, in numbers, that his program is improving.
Sarah's record — not a status code. A diary: "Sarah opened the link from her phone Monday 8:12 am, paused 14 min at the doc picker, finished at 8:36 am. Identity verified at 9:02." He sees the human.
One amber friction signal — "Another new hire, Priya, hasn't opened her link in 4 days. Try resending." Plain English. No legal citations.
Section 2 in 90 seconds — documents pre-filled from Sarah's wallet capture, examiner just confirms. E-Verify fires automatically. Authorization confirmed before lunch.
Goes home calm. No spreadsheet to reconcile, no folder to filing, no anxiety about whether he missed something.

Other vendors show Marcus a status column. We show him the human and tell him when to care.

DOL / ICE auditor

Jane

Box of paper → cryptographic proof

Notice of inspection arrives Monday morning — DOL gives the employer 3 business days. With other vendors that means panic and a stack.
Marcus clicks one button — "Build response packet." Date range, notice reference, done. By lunch the ZIP is ready.
Inside the ZIP — cover letter, audit chain CSV, per-employee record PDFs, E-Verify dispositions, retention policies, HRIS reconciliation gap. Every row carries a cryptographic proof.
Jane verifies independently — drops the manifest root hash into verify.i9.trua.cloud, and the public portal confirms each row is tamper-evident. She doesn't need to trust the employer. She doesn't need to trust us.
Inspection closed in hours, not weeks. The cryptographic chain holds. The employer's compliance posture is provable, not promised.

Other vendors hand Jane a stack of PDFs and hope. We hand her verifiable proof. Nobody else in the I-9 space does this.

The competition built workflow for HR. We built a system for everyone around the I-9.

Stop us at our booth and ask any other vendor to show you the same.

The shift

Your candidate's verification stops starting over.

Today's I-9 platforms sell workflow. Workflow is table stakes. The leverage is in who owns the verification — and what happens at the next employer.

Today

Your candidate fills Section 1 on Day 1. Your examiner reviews documents on Day 3. Records archives PDFs and waits for an audit. Repeat per hire. Errors creep in. Remote workforces depend on photos shuffled by email. When ICE knocks, you produce a stack and hope the chain holds.

With Trua I-9

Your candidate verifies their identity before Day 1, on their own time. They receive a cryptographically-signed readiness credential they control. When they accept your offer, Section 1 auto-populates from verified evidence. Your examiner reviews and signs Section 2. The audit chain is tamper-evident — inspectors verify the package offline, on any laptop.

Their next employer doesn't re-verify. They present the same credential.

How it works

Three steps. One credential. Every employer.

The candidate experience is built around the moment they accept your offer — not the morning of Day 1.

1

Verify once

Pre-hire, on the candidate's phone, on their own time. Trua confirms identity and work-authorization documents to IAL2 standards. The candidate keeps the verified evidence in their wallet — not in your records system.

2

Present at hire

When the candidate accepts your offer, their wallet presents the readiness credential. Section 1 auto-populates from verified evidence. Your examiner reviews documents and signs Section 2. The audit chain is tamper-evident at every step.

3

Carry forward

The credential follows the candidate. Their next employer — and the one after — doesn't re-verify. The same trust artifact satisfies every I-9. The same trust artifact satisfied your background screening, too.

Audit-grade guarantees

Three things that hold under federal scrutiny.

Compliance posture isn't a feature you bolt on — it's a property of the architecture. These three are properties.

Tamper-evident, M-274 compliant

Every audit event chains to the previous via cryptographic hash. Mutate one byte and verification fails at the exact event. Federal audits prove what happened — not what we say happened.

E-Verify-native, TNC-aware

Tentative-Non-Confirmation escalation triggers from the same workflow that signed Section 2. No portal swap. No second sign-in. The 10-federal-business-day contest clock starts on time, automatically.

Alt Procedure built in

Section 2 by live video for fully-remote workforces. Document capture meets federal "clear and legible" standards by design — not by examiner judgment under pressure.

Built on Trua

One product family, two faces.

Reusable Verified Credentials and Background Screening run on the same trust infrastructure. The same identity, the same compliance team, the same audit posture.

For Trua Background Screening customers

The vendor diligence is already done. Trua I-9 extends what you already trust — same SOC 2, same compliance team, same audit log surface — without asking your team to swap platforms or evaluate a new vendor from scratch.

New to Trua?

We'd happily have both conversations — I-9 and Background Screening — because they share the same architecture. The trust artifact you issue once compounds across every compliance surface a candidate touches.

For your buying committee

What each stakeholder wants to know first.

The briefing memo we'll send after the booth conversation has the full picture. These are the headlines.

Legal & Compliance

M-274, IRCA, GDPR — covered.

Tamper-evident chain + two-phase purge means we can answer "did you ever hold this data?" (yes, here's the chain) and "do you still hold it?" (no, purged on retention TTL) in the same audit response. State-PII statutes (CA, NY, IL) handled in the discovery call.

IT & Security

SOC 2 Type II, KMS-encrypted, standards-aligned.

Evidence store on dedicated KMS CMK; no shared infrastructure with our background-screening tenancy. Single-tenant deploy option for orgs >50k hires/yr. OID4VCI standards-aligned wallet protocol means no proprietary client lock-in.