… to check Employment and Visa Status as well as Nationality of any worker who will be working on your site. The last thing you want is for the IT contractor in the middle of an upgrade to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System, or the highly trained system engineer with the rare skill required to fix your production line, to be deported in the middle of the project!
Due to the low limit on H-1B Visas from the American protectionists, it is a strong possibility that it could happen, as SI really doubts that Infosys was the only outsourcer to abuse the system and illegally bring workers in on B-1 visas to work on client IT projects. (On October 30, Indian tech giant Infosys agreed to a $34 Million civil settlement with US authorities to “resolve all allegations” and end visa-fraud investigations and have the serious criminal charges that could be brought against the company dropped after federal prosecutors in Texas found it had committed “systemic visa fraud and abuse”. As per this detailed article over on First Post, Infosys agreed to the settlement after prosecutors, as a result of a two-year investigation, unveiled its accusations that Infosys “knowingly and unlawfully” brought Engineers into the US on B-1 visitors for onsite client projects that actually required H-1B visas.)
So when you are outsourcing your projects, if you want to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, demand to know the following with respect to any contractor who will be working on site:
- Full Legal Name
- Nationalities
- Unique Government Identifier for at least one Nationality
such as Passport ID, Drivers License ID, etc. - Current Legal Status in the Country where the work will be performed
- If the legal status is not citizen, proof of legal status (to work)
And if any of this information is not provider to you, with sufficient time for you to verify such, before the contractor is brought on site, deny the contractor access to your site. Maybe you’ll have to wait a few extra days, or pay a little more, but you won’t have to worry about being an accomplice to illegal activity or losing a critical resource at the worst possible time in the middle of a project.