Labor Certification, Prevailing Wages, and H-1B Timing Issues

September 30 marks the end of fiscal year for 2011. I wanted to review some statistics regarding labor certification information by the US Dept. of Labor which shows some interesting statistics about labor certification processing times and audits between October 1, 2010 and May 31, 2011.

Labor certification audits are still taking about a year for review and out of approximately 22,000 of the cases that were pending as of May 31, 2011, only 44% of those case were pending initial analyst reviews. The rest of the 56% were either in audit, appeal, or at the sponsorship verification stage. Since DOL reported a 63% increase in applications compared to 2010, we can probably expect that audit queue to increase.

As many of you may have noticed, prevailing wage requests are taking more than 3 months for a determination. Those who might need to file labor certifications before the end of the year in order to preserve the ability to extend an H-1B might begin thinking about leaving the US and recapturing H-1B time later if you are unable to file the initial labor certification 365 days before your anticipated H-1B expiration date. While admittedly, this isn’t the ideal scenario, it stops the H-1B clock, even if momentarily… so that you can plan for a timely extension when you’re eligible. Call the business immigration attorneys at Romben Law, APC if you’d like an assessment of your labor certification or H-1B case, don’t wait another second! –ecf