Conferences at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on the same day prompt an employee’s request, approved by her manager, to work from home that day. Cause for concern? There is, if the employee is a “specialty occupation” worker in H-1B visa status. In a case the authors recently encountered, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) moved to revoke the employer’s H-1B petition because the employee happened to be working from home on the day USCIS conducted a worksite inspection.
Unannounced worksite inspections are now fairly routine for H-1B workers and their employers—14,433 H-1B site visits were conducted in fiscal year 2010.1 While not every petitioner gets visited, that’s a large enough pool that site visits are now a standard verse in immigration lawyers’ litany on H-1B compliance. Since 2005, USCIS has collected $500 from employers for every new H-1B (and L-1 intracompany transferee) petition filed. Congress introduced this fraud prevention and detection surcharge, as the name implies, to fund USCIS efforts to combat perceived fraud in the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.
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