It’s a year of uncharted waters. A new on-line registration process for the FY21 H-1B Cap and a viral pandemic that has changed the way we are conducting everyday business.
Regardless of the havoc that COVID-19 has wreaked on our way of living and conducting business, the USCIS has continued its operations, and the FY21 H-1B cap registrations continued to be filed on-line until the deadline of today, March 20, 2020, at 12:00pm EST.
While we cannot fully assess the overall utility and success of the new registration process until the results of the lottery are completed and shared, in looking back at the last 20 days, we can say that the on-line platform was largely successful, while saving our clients the expense of preparing and filing full H-1B petitions in order for their candidates to be considered in the H-1B lottery.
The on-line registration opened on Sunday, March 1, 2020 at 12 noon, EST. The most notable technological glitch occurred in the completion of the Notice of Representation (Form G-28) where attorneys were forced to choose between submitting the registrations as early as possible due to fear of an overall system crash (which required attorneys to wrongly indicated that they were unauthorized to practice law or under an order of suspension) or exercise patience and wait until the glitch was fixed by USCIS. The Immigration Law Group at Meyner and Landis chose the latter, which was the correct choice, as after a number of practitioners sounded alarm bells, USCIS rectified the issue within in 3-4 days.
Overall, the platform functioned well and, for the most part, the interface and process followed the protocols outlined in the webinars conducted by the USCIS prior to opening of the registration period.
Our primary criticisms with the USCIS Registration platform, while minor, are as follows:
- Attorneys were able to “Add a Client” but when beginning a registration form, the client name had to be re-entered. Similarly, once a registration was submitted, if a company added new beneficiaries, there was no pre-population of company information so that all company information had to be re-entered again, increasing the likelihood of typographical errors.
- The system did not allow employers to modify the “account type” that they had created, so if the employer created the wrong account type, they were forced to open a new account under a different email address.
- Once the G-28 has been initiated, the registration form became un-editable. If a change needed to be made, the registration had to be deleted and prepared anew.
Given the fact that there are growing pains with all new processes and all new on-line platforms have technological issues, our overall assessment of the H-1B registration process (pre-lottery results) is positive.
We will update our assessment once the results of the lottery are posted.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Anthony F. Siliato or Scott R. Malyk.