Prevailing Wage Document: Fill & Download for Free

Yes, it’s definitely plausible and varies by case but there are a few issues to consider before your employer should request a petition. As I am sure you already know, you cannot file the petition yourself (even in F1 status) as it has to be done by your employer. Startups often have concerns over whether or not they can successfully petition for H-1B visas.Before getting into if it’s realistic, you need to ask the potential hire 3 big-picture questions that determine if they qualify for an H1-B Visa in the first place:Do you have a bachelor's degree or the equivalent (3 years of experience can equal 1 year of education)?Will you be working in a specialty occupation (science, tech, engineering, math, business)?Will the employee be paid an hourly wage?These are the requirements, broken down for an H1-B Visa and examples of evidence to meet them:Do the prospective hire and the startup have an employer-employee relationship? (Can you-the startup hire, fire, pay, supervise, and control its employees?)***If you own your company, if your company has a board of directors, preferred shareholders, investors; these are factors that show control.Your company can use the following documents as evidence: Term Sheet; Capitalization Table; Stock purchase Agreement; Investor rights Agreement; Voting Agreement; Organizational documents and operating agreementsDoes the position offered to the potential hire require a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent?US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) often refers to the Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) from the Department of Labor (DOL) to help determine whether certain jobs require a degree.If the OOH indicates that a bachelor’s degree isn’t required, these are examples of evidence you can use to show that a degree is required:Copies of past position announcementsA detailed description of the petitioner’s business/products/services and the duties of the position, along with written opinions from experts confirming that your position is so specialized or complex it can only be performed by someone with a degree (in a related field).Job listings, letters and/or affidavits from other employers reflecting the minimum requirements for the position and which shows that the degree requirement is common to the industry in parallel positions among similar organizations.Written opinions from experts in the field explaining how the degree is related to the role you will perform.Is the potential hire being paid at least the actual or prevailing wage for their occupation, whichever is higher based on the US Department of Labor’s database?The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) maintains a database with applicable current prevailing wage levels based on occupation and work location.To view the wage database and estimate the prevailing wage that may be required for your position, click here.How do you show that the potential hire will be paid the actual/prevailing wage?Submit a Labor Condition Application (LCA) for your position, certified by the Secretary of Labor.If the person needing an H1-B Visa is already working for your company, they should provide W-2’s and recent pay stubs to show they’re being paid an appropriate wage.The H-1B visa has an annual numerical limit, or cap, of 65,000 visas each fiscal year. The first 20,000 petitions filed on behalf of beneficiaries with a U.S. master’s degree or higher are exempt from the cap.Additionally, H-1B workers who are petitioned for or employed at an institution of higher education (or its affiliated or related nonprofit entities), a nonprofit research organization, or a government research organization are not subject to this numerical cap.Cap numbers are often used up very quickly, so it is important to plan in advance if you will be filing for an H-1B visa that is subject to the annual H-1B numerical cap. The U.S. government’s fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.H-1B petitions can be filed up to 6 months before the start date, which is generally April 1 for an October 1 start date.To summarize, as long as the process is carefully planned out and the documentation is available, the startup should have no issue obtaining an H-1B approval. However, an experienced attorney is an important part of this process and can navigate this often very complex process. We can connect you with a qualified attorney for a free consult today at LawTrades.

You don’t need to be worried if the job you are doing matches up with the description provided to USCIS by your employer and you’re being paid a prevailing wage.What this rule change does is keep honest employers who might be taking advantage of the H1B program. The review allows USCIS to ensure that program is not being abused by basically making things up and then getting six years of unfettered use of that employee on their terms.If anything it will cut down on employer abuse of the H1B program by requiring them to justify and document their actions. For employers not abusive conforming to this process will be easy as they’ll have the documentation available and able to produce it. For those who are abusive or trying to game the system this will make it harder for them.For you, the employee, this should not affect you as the filing of the extension relies mostly on the employer to provide information. If USCIS asks you for information it will be to check against what the employer has provided.I wouldn’t worry too much about this. It is mainly administrative against employers.

H1B abuse isn't something individuals do, it's something companies do. Today, the odds are very, very high that any given H1B beneficiary is a party to abuse. This is a relatively new phenomenon, and seems to have become endemic in just the last 15 years.The workers may not think there's anything wrong because they get to work in the U.S. and everyone seems to be doing the same thing, but they are almost certainly being paid less than they should be and imported for jobs they aren't permitted to do. If you know anyone who was placed on a zero-hour contract, assigned to an office other than their employer's, or who paid fees or had deductions for visas or processing, you almost certainly know someone involved in H1B abuse.There are five broad types of H1B abuse:replacing US workerspaying below the prevailing wagesusing H1Bs as tempswage theftsmuggling and employing undocumented immigrants.What is described below is criminal, in the a very literal sense. It's not even a comprehensive list, it's just a quick sample compiled in a few minutes. If they weren't billion-dollar companies, each of the largest petitioners for H1Bs would be permanently banned from sponsoring visas. There would probably be extradition requests for the executives, and they certainly would have outstanding warrants.Replacing US workers:One of the most famous cases came out of Southern California Edison (2015):Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs. ...SCE, Southern California's largest utility, has confirmed the layoffs and the hiring of Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Mumbai. (Southern California Edison IT workers 'beyond furious' over H-1B replacements)Similar incidents occurred at Northeast Utilities in 2013 (?) and Disney in 2015 (?):Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost. ...HCL America, a branch of a global company based in Noida, India, won a contract with Disney in 2012. In a statement, the company said details of the agreement were confidential. (Pink Slips at Disney. But First, Training Foreign Replacements.)Paying below the prevailing wage:This one is so systemic that it's pointless to choose examples. It's obvious in the statistics for all of the largest H1B petitioners: the average salary of their H1B employees is below the prevailing wage for the industry. The usual excuse is something like "we hired them at the prevailing wage in Flint, Michigan, and now they just happen to work in San Francisco." Which gets to the next problem, that the entire "consulting" model is basically an H1B violation.Using H1Bs as temps:The 2009 Vision Systems Group case:The companies that are the subject of this investigation have asserted that the foreign workers have been brought to the U.S. to fill existing vacancies. However, the companies allegedly have not always had jobs available for these workers, thereby placing them in non-pay status after they arrive in the United States. In some cases, the foreign workers have allegedly been placed in jobs and locations not previously certified by the Department of Labor, displacing qualified American workers and violating prevailing wage laws. (11 Arrested, Indicted in Multi-State Operation Targeting Visa and Mail Fraud)The 2013 Dibon Solutions case:The indictment says that Dibon recruited foreign workers and sponsored them for H-1B visas to work at the firm's headquarters, but required them to provide consulting services to third-party companies located elsewhere. The company only paid the H-1B workers when they were placed at a third party company, "and only if the third party company actually paid Dibon first for the workers' services"... (H-1B 'Benching' Visa Fraud Indictment Unsealed in Texas) [Indictment PDF]The 2014 Silicon Valley Systech case:[A] Cupertino man involved with one body shop pleaded guilty and was sentenced in US District Court to 19 felony counts of visa fraud where he admitted he knowingly applied for work visas for foreigners who had no job offers, filling out applications for fake jobs for a Silicon Valley tech firm...“Most of these people had also paid substantial fees, illegally, to cover the cost of the H-1B visa application to the United States,” said Ng, a labor attorney in San Francisco. He considers Santa Clara-based Silicon Valley Systech to be a body shop. Ng said many of the SVS workers were “benched” once they arrived in the US, meaning there was no job and were forced to wait for work on the “bench.” Under H-1B rules, that’s illegal. ...Midway through the lawsuit’s process in 2009, Silicon Valley Systech went out of business, leaving workers with nothing. (Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants)The 2013 BCG Consulting case:Balarkishan Patwardhan, the 52-year-old head of BCG Consulting, was arrested Monday and charged with making false claims in an attempt to procure tech worker visas for 19 employees, according to an indictment filed in federal court in San Jose, California. Federal prosecutors allege Mr. Patwardhan falsely claimed on visa applications that the computer system analysts and programmers he was sponsoring had full time job offers and salaries. In reality, the government says, the full time jobs did not exist. (Government Cracks Down On Tech Visa Fraud)Wage theft:In 2013, Tata Consulting paid $30 million to settle a class action suit alleging tax fraud and wage theft.The complaint charged that Tata breached the contracts of its non-U.S.-citizen employees by requiring them to sign over their federal and state tax refund checks to Tata, and by failing to pay its non-U.S.-citizen employees the monies promised to those employees before they came to the United States. (Tata Workers in America Wages Class Action Lawsuit)“It comes down to people not getting paid what they’re promised to get paid or what they should be getting paid,” Hutchinson said. “And that’s actually the experience that we’ve seen for a lot of people where people have come forward and company officials have told them, ‘if you complain about this, if you don’t sign over this amount, if you don’t agree to this deduction, then we can just send you back to India.’” (Highly Educated Foreign Workers Treated Like Indentured Servants)Smuggling and employing undocumented immigrants:While denying that it committed visa fraud, Infosys has agreed to pay the largest penalty ever for alleged immigration violations—$34 million—to close the investigation and conclude the civil case... From 2008 to 2011, Infosys "as a matter of practice" wrote "invitation letters"—documents submitted to and reviewed by U.S. consular officials and other immigration officials—that misrepresented the purpose of employees' travel, according to the government complaint...."To circumvent the requirements, limitations and governmental oversight of the H-1B visa program, Infosys committed visa fraud by knowingly and unlawfully using B-1 visa holders to perform skilled labor in order to fill positions for employment that would otherwise be performed by United States citizens or require legitimate H-1B visa holders," according to the complaint. (U.S. Accuses Infosys of 'Fraud and Abuse' in Visa Case)