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.
As of 27 April 2012 count, USCIS has received 29,200 regular cap H-1 B petitions and 12,300 advanced degree H-1B petitions. These numbers are considerably higher than the ones we saw at this time in the fiscal years 2011 and 2012 (we are now in FY 2013).