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What triggers H-1B audits

By Annie Banerjee

In July of 2010, the CIS decided to use the $500/- fraud fee and conduct sweeping raids of many H-1B sponsoring companies. They conducted a study which revealed that a lot of H-1B Sponsors were not following the rules. The following are some of the criteria that was recently released by ICE as to what factors were used to determine what businesses to raid.

1. Unknown or unusual addresses or email addresses--- who determines what is unusual? Are officers familiar with every type of business in America. They then have more brain than Einstein.

2. Skill/age/salary/ education does not match job requirements- If this happens, why not simply deny the petition?

3. No record of correspondence with parent company-This is for L-1 cases, and is understandable.

4. Zoning inconsistent with business-The CIS does not believe that businesses can be conducted from homes, so they frown upon any address that does not look like an office address. I doubt the officers actually look at specific zoning requirements of any subdivision.

5. Unusual data in quarterly reports

6. Labor certification right before sunset of 245i (April 30, 2001)

7. Multiple filings by petitioner is inconsistent with company size- Company's Size is the big no no for CIS. Small businesses are not allowed to thrive under the democratic rule.

8. Location on ETA 750A or ETA 9035 differs from place of employment

9. No record of providing goods or services

10. Boilerplate documents that are in more than one petition- This can be problematic especially when the Companies file H-1B by themselves and use the same job description for every petition.

As anyone can see a lot of these are subjective criteria, leaving much room for discrimination. Thus overwhelmingly, small Companies are raided rather than big ones. This puts an undue burden on small companies who don't have resources to fight the Government.

Moreover the officers used in the raids are often new and untrained in the Complexities of Immigration Law. So rather than some job creation, the only purpose of the H-1B raids is to hassle employers and H-1B beneficiaries.

Contact Houston Immigration Lawyer, Annie Banerjee for more details

Full post as published by US Immigration Matters on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).