H-1B Site Visits: The Knock You Should Be Ready For
An officer can walk into your office, show government credentials, and ask to talk about one of your H-1B workers. No appointment, no warning letter, and usually no accusation. That is an administrative site visit, and for an H-1B employer it is a normal part of having a petition approved — or even still pending. The question is not whether you can stop it. The question is whether what the officer finds matches what you filed.
Site visits are run by the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, called FDNS, inside U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Under the Administrative Site Visit and Verification Program, FDNS conducts compliance reviews to verify the information in a petition: that the employer exists and operates as described, that the worker is actually employed there, and that the job, the work location, and the pay are what the petition and the Labor Condition Application (LCA) said they would be.
The authority is in the regulation itself, at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(4)(i)(B)(2), and in the petition you signed. USCIS may verify petition information by phone, electronically, and by on-site inspection at any time after the petition is filed, before or after it is decided. An inspection can happen at headquarters, at a satellite office, at a third-party worksite, or at the place where the worker works, has worked, or will work — which includes a home office when that is the listed worksite. It is not limited to employers USCIS already suspects.
Some visits are random. Others are targeted. USCIS says its targeted visits focus on three kinds of cases: H-1B-dependent employers, meaning employers with a high ratio of H-1B workers compared to U.S. workers, as defined by statute; cases where USCIS cannot validate the employer's basic business information through commercially available data; and employers petitioning for workers who work off-site at another company or organization's location. USCIS also visits where there are suspicions of fraud or abuse, including tips from the public, and it says it will continue random, unannounced visits to H-1B employers generally. A random visit means little by itself. Treat it seriously anyway.
What does the officer actually do? Expect a tour of the premises and photographs of the worksite. Expect interviews: with the person who signed the petition, with human resources, with the worker's manager, and with the worker. The worker may be interviewed separately — the regulation expressly allows interviews to be conducted in the absence of the employer or its representatives. The questions are predictable because they come straight from the petition: job title, duties, hours, supervisor, start date, work location, salary, and the worker's education and background. The officer may also ask to see records, such as the petition and LCA, payroll records and pay stubs, wage reports, and business records that show the company is real and operating.
Have a plan for the first five minutes. Front-desk staff should know to verify the officer's credentials, take the officer's business card, and call the one person your company has designated for a visit — not improvise answers. That person should call your immigration lawyer at once. A lawyer who can be reached may be able to join by telephone, and you may ask for that, but the officer is not required to wait for counsel to arrive or to reschedule the visit around counsel. So the plan cannot be "stall until the lawyer gets here." The plan is a calm designated person, the petition file within reach, and people who answer truthfully and briefly.
Two rules protect you in the room. First, never guess. If nobody present knows an answer or has a document, say so, write down the request, and follow up — a wrong answer given confidently creates a discrepancy that did not have to exist. Second, understand what refusing means. Officers ask for your participation, and older descriptions of the program called the visit voluntary. Do not rely on that word. Under the current regulation, if USCIS cannot verify the facts because the petitioner or a third party failed or refused to cooperate in an inspection, that failure may result in denial or revocation of the H-1B petitions for workers performing services at the location inspected, including a third-party worksite. Turning an officer away is not a safe way to end a visit.
After the officer leaves, write down everything while it is fresh: who came, what was asked, what was shown, and what was promised as follow-up. The officer does not decide your case on the spot. The officer prepares a compliance review report, and USCIS adjudicators use it. If the facts check out, that is usually the end of it. If they do not, USCIS may ask for more evidence, issue a notice of intent to deny a pending petition, or issue a notice of intent to revoke an approved one — which gives the employer a chance to respond before revocation. Where FDNS finds indicators of serious fraud, it may refer the case to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for further investigation, and deliberate fraud in immigration filings can carry criminal consequences as well. That is a different and much more serious track than a compliance problem, and it is why a discrepancy should be dealt with as a legal matter, not explained away at the front desk.
Keep the agencies' jobs straight, because employers often mix them up. FDNS checks whether the petition is true. Pay is a good example. An FDNS officer will ask what the worker is paid and will look for "benching" — a worker sitting unpaid in the United States while waiting for a project. But enforcement of the LCA wage promise itself belongs to the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, under 20 CFR Part 655. The required wage is the higher of the prevailing wage and the employer's actual wage for similarly employed workers, and an employer generally must still pay it for nonproductive time that is the employer's doing — no project, no assignment, a gap between placements. Time off the worker genuinely chooses, for personal reasons unrelated to the job, is treated differently. Back wages and other Labor Department sanctions are a Labor Department process, separate from anything USCIS does with the petition. Separately again, the Justice Department enforces the rule against discriminating against U.S. workers in hiring. Three agencies, three different questions.
One correction matters for most employers: there is no general duty for every H-1B employer to prove it tried to recruit U.S. workers first. The good-faith recruitment and non-displacement attestations are extra obligations that apply to H-1B-dependent employers, and targeted visits are one way USCIS checks whether those employers are meeting them. Do not volunteer for duties that are not yours — and if you are H-1B-dependent, do not treat the attestations you did make as paperwork. They are part of what a visit can test.
Third-party placements deserve special care, because the officer may go to the client's site, not yours. The petition and the LCA should name where the work will actually be done, and the client should know in advance that a visit is possible there and who to call if one happens. An older USCIS policy that demanded contracts and a detailed itinerary covering the whole requested period at a third-party site has been rescinded — there is no separate itinerary regulation to satisfy for a petitioning employer. That does not make the placement informal. You still have to show, from the petition evidence, that there is bona fide specialty occupation work for the worker to do at that site, and that the worker will be doing it. And if the worker moves to a new worksite outside the area covered by the LCA, or the job changes materially, that can require a new LCA and an amended petition before the move — not a quiet update after an officer notices.
Readiness, in practice, is housekeeping done before anyone knocks. Keep the complete petition, the certified LCA, and the public access file where your designated person can reach them. Audit your own cases from time to time: does the worker's actual title, duties, supervisor, location — including remote and hybrid arrangements — and pay still match the filing, and has payroll kept up with the LCA wage through slow periods? Do the manager and the worker each describe the same job the petition describes, because they learned it from the job itself, not from a script? Fix a mismatch when you find it, with an amendment if one is needed. A visit goes well when the workplace and the paperwork are simply two descriptions of the same thing.
Tell me what you are working on and I will reply in writing, focusing on the issues involved.
General information, not legal advice. Requirements and processing change; we confirm current rules for your case.