H1B Electronic Registration
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On December 6, 2019 USCIS announced that it would implement a requirement that employers who want to file H-1B cap-subject petitions for fiscal year (FY) 2021, must first electronically register and pay a $10 fee to determine if they may file an H-1B petition through a lottery.
The employer can register electronically at myUSCIS online portal. USCIS has announced that prospective petitioners may begin creating H-1B registrant accounts through the MyUSCIS portal starting February 24, 2020. Starting on that date, USCIS will provide prospective petitioners the option to create an account in the myUSCIS portal that is designated as “I am an H-1B registrant.”
The initial registration period opened on March 1 at noon (ET) and will run through noon (ET) on March 20. All registrations submitted during the initial registration period will be included in the lottery, regardless of whether a registration was submitted on March 1 or March 20. However, since this is the first year of the new registration process, it’s best not to wait until the last moment to register. The lottery is supposed to be run no later than March 31, when the winners will be announced.
The following basic information about the petitioning employer and the beneficiary employee will be required for the registration:
PETITIONER’S INFORMATION
• Legal name of the petitioning company
• The Doing Business As names of the petitioning company, if applicable
• Employer identification number (EIN) of the petitioning company
• Primary U.S. office address of the petitioning company
• Legal name, title, and contact information (daytime phone number and email address) of the authorized signatory
BENEFICIARY INFORMATION:
• Beneficiary’s legal name
• Beneficiary’s gender
• Beneficiary’s date of birth
• Are you requesting consideration under the INA 214(g)(5)(C) advanced degree exemption because the beneficiary has earned, or will earn prior to the filing of the petition, a master’s or higher degree from a U.S. institution of higher education?3
• Beneficiary’s country of birth
• Beneficiary’s country of citizenship
• Beneficiary’s passport number
No information regarding the offered position will be required to be provided to USCIS as part of the electronic registration process, such as the job title or the minimum job requirements. A Labor Condition Application (“LCA”) is not required to be completed prior to the electronic registration process, however, you might want to prepare and submit it in advance to give you enough time to quickly file the H1B application upon selection.
During the registration period, USCIS will permit users to edit the registrations of beneficiaries as many times as needed before the registration is submitted. Once a registration has been submitted, USCIS will not permit a registration to be edited, however, USCIS will permit the registration of an individual beneficiary to be deleted, without impacting the registrations of other beneficiaries in the registration batch.
While there is no limit on the total number of beneficiaries that a petitioner may register for the H-1B visa lottery, each registration process can only accommodate up to 250 beneficiaries at a time. Additional beneficiaries can be added to subsequent registrations for the same petitioner.
If USCIS receives more than enough registrations than needed to meet the regular H-1B cap and advanced degree exemption, all registrations that were not selected in the lottery will remain on reserve for the applicable fiscal year. If USCIS determines that it needs to increase the number of registrations for that fiscal year, USCIS will be choosing from the reserve to meet the H1B cap. It’s unclear how this selection will be implemented.
Once a registration is selected, petitioners will have at least 90 days from the date of a registration selection to submit a complete H-1B petition to USCIS. USCIS will indicate in the selection notice the 90-day filing window and designate the Service Center where the petitioner must file the H-1B petition. Petitions will be adjudicated in the order in which they are received. As long as a petition is properly filed during the petition filing window it will be adjudicated.