As everyone knows, the Department of Labor has not conducted many, if any, supervised recruitment or requests to audit the recruiting results. This has been true for almost 20 years, at least with our firm.
However, what has happened is companies either innocently out of ignorance or on purpose to circumvent the PERM requirements, certify to the Certifying Office (CO) that there were no qualified US workers during the recruitment when in fact there were qualified applicants but the company gambled DOL would not require an audit.
This information is brought to our attention when we review the PERM file for other attorneys and notice a number of qualified US workers being rejected for no reason at all. Our practice, as well as that of other Board-Certified Immigration Attorneys, is to prepare the audit response when the 9089 is submitted. At that point, not when audited later, we have all of the recruiting steps information, list of applicants and job-related reasons for disqualification. At no point is someone disqualified because they are “close” but not quite qualified even though they actually are qualified and the test of labor market has failed.
In addition to employers being on guard for these activities, employees should be as well. It is “their” green card case that will collapse if DOL or CIS discover these violations of PERM law.
