Following up on its March 27, 2023 announcement that it had received enough initial registrations for the Fiscal Year 2024 (“FY24”) H-1B Cap, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”) has released data about the number of registrations received for the visa lottery. USCIS received a record breaking 780,884 H-1B registrations during the three week registration period. Of these over 780 thousand registrations, USCIS determined 758,994 were eligible registrations. This figure excludes duplicate registrations, those with failed payments, and those that were deleted by prospective employers prior to the closing of the registration period. The number of registrations for FY24 mark a sixty-one percent increase from 474,421 eligible registrations received for FY23. This significant increase has raised “serious concerns” and USCIS has begun to investigate potential employers who may have worked together to submit multiple registrations on behalf of the same beneficiary to increase their chance of being selected in the H-1B lottery.

Each prospective employer who submits a registration on behalf of a foreign national prospective employee, must certify under penalty of perjury that the registration reflects a legitimate job offer, and that the employer has not worked with another company to unfairly increase the chance of selection for the beneficiary. USCIS can deny a petition if it discovers an attestation is false. According to Michelle Hackman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who first reported the story, “U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services . . . said it has found that a small number of companies are responsible for entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times, with the alleged goal of artificially boosting their chances of winning a visa.”

USCIS found evidence that a “few dozen” small companies in the tech and information-technology sectors which are not commonly known names in those sectors are responsible for submitting multiple registration entries. According to USCIS, the companies have been referred for potential criminal prosecution. The investigation should aid in disqualifying applicants with multiple entries to boost their chances if they committed fraud. Notably, if enough of the fraudulent applications are rejected, “it is possible that the government will run a lottery to hit the congressionally mandated 85,000 visa cap”.