U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS) has stated that it may temporarily suspend Premium Processing Service for H-1B cap-subject petitions filed on April 1, 2008. Premium Processing Service guarantees processing of an H-1B petition within 15 business days with the payment of an additional fee. Last year, however, with the large number of H-1B cap-subject petitions that were filed, the H-1B cap was reached by April 2, 2007 and USCIS placed its H-1B petitions in a random lottery selection process. USCIS also suspended its Premium Processing Service due to the large volume of H-1B receipts it had to issue for the petitions that received a cap number in the random selection process.
Although Premium Processing Service is currently available, USCIS expects to receive a similar volume of H-1B cap-subject petitions on April 1, 2008 as it did last year. Based on last year's trends, it is very likely that USCIS will suspend its Premium Processing Service again this year. We advise our clients to wait and see if their petition receives an H-1B cap number. If the H-1B petition is accepted for processing, we can subsequently interfile a Premium Processing Service request to expedite processing of the H-1B petition.
