U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has expanded site visits to employers that sponsor foreign workers. Conducted by USCIS’s Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS) unit, the site visits are often conducted without advance notice. During the site visits, USCIS confirms the employer’s existence, verifies the accuracy of information provided by the employer in visa petitions, and assesses whether foreign workers are employed in positions consistent with their employers’ petitions. McCown & Evans drafts all immigration petitions carefully so that the information contained in the filings accurately represents our clients’ true circumstances. You may therefore have full confidence that cases prepared by our firm will withstand any investigation.
If your company is contacted by an FDNS officer, call your McCown & Evans attorney immediately to discuss your options, including the possibility of having counsel present during a site visit. It may be helpful to explain to the FDNS officer that the involvement of the company’s immigration counsel will help the employer respond fully and accurately to the officer’s queries.
Although the FDNS unit has conducted employer site visits for several years, it has recently added additional staff and intensified its investigative efforts. While site visits were historically focused on approved immigration petitions, the agency is now more frequently using site visits to verify information in petitions that are pending with USCIS. Such investigative authority is expressly allowed by USCIS regulations. Employers filing petitions for nonimmigrant workers authorize the release of any information from their records that USCIS might need to determine eligibility. Failing to cooperate with FDNS investigators could jeopardize an employer’s pending petitions and its ability to continue to sponsor foreign workers.
In addition to verifying the validity of data contained in an employer’s immigration petitions, FDNS officers use information collected during site visits to populate the agency’s fraud detection database, developing profiles of the types of companies that have a history of good faith use of immigration programs and records of immigration compliance, and also to identify factors that could indicate fraud.
During site visits, FDNS officers often work from a standard list of questions. Officers commonly ask about the employer’s business, annual revenues, the number of employees at a particular worksite, whether the employer filed the immigration petition in question, whether the foreign national is actually employed by the employer, the foreign national’s position, job duties and salary, and the foreign national’s qualifications for the position, educational background, previous employment and immigration history, residence and dependents in the United States. In addition to conducting interviews, the FDNS officer may ask to tour and possibly photograph the employer’s premises, or examine the foreign national’s work area. The officer may also request payroll records, an organizational chart, or other documentation pertaining to the foreign national’s employment.
In some cases, FDNS officers may ask for very specific information, like the number of foreign workers employed by the company or the number of H-1B or L-1 petitions filed by the employer within a given time period. An employer can usually request a reasonable amount of time to gather the information sought.
McCown & Evans will continue to report on the status of the FDNS site visit program and will issue additional information as it develops.
