On August 13, 2010, President Obama signed into law Public Law 111-230. The new law contains provisions that require petitioners to pay an additional $2,000 for certain H-1B petitions and an additional $2,250 for certain L-1 petitions. To begin public outreach on this legislation, USCIS held a teleconference on August 19, 2010 to share how USCIS will implement it.
Our office was retained to process an H-1 Change of Status petition for a Quality Assurance Engineer working on a turnkey project owned by a middle vendor at a client location. We explained to USCIS that the end-client was infact the vendor, who “owned” the project. USCIS denied the petition, holdingthat we had failed to obtain proper documentation from the end-client. We filed an MTR with extensive arguments and evidence that the petitioner was the actual employer of the beneficiary and that the vendor, not the end-client, owned the project.