Your attorney is responsible for filing the cases. But the burden of running an immigration program at your company still falls on you. That means building clear processes for when there's a role change, a location change, a salary adjustment, or a government notice that needs to reach counsel the same day it arrives. Use this checklist to find out where your program is working and where it has gaps.
Situations you'll recognize
- A hiring manager promotes an engineer to a new title. The HRIS gets updated. Payroll follows. No one flags immigration before the change goes live. Three months later, the H-1B petition on file still reflects the old job.
- An employee moves from Seattle to Denver and updates their address in payroll. The change processes normally. The LCA still shows Seattle. It comes up at the next extension filing, by which point the employee has been working from the wrong worksite for eight months.
- A government notice arrives on a Thursday. It sits in the shared inbox over the weekend. By Monday, someone forwards it to counsel. Two days of the response window are already gone.
- An employee in year 4 of their H-1B asks about starting the green card process. If they're from India in the EB-2 or EB-3 category, year 4 is often too late to protect them before their H-1B max-out date. The conversation should have happened in year 2.
Program infrastructure
Your program likely has some version of these already. The burden is making sure they're actually working, not just nominally in place. Start here if you haven't done a structured review in the last year.
- ✓Your attorney relationship covers reactive situations, not just planned filings. The regular filings will get done -- that's the baseline. The question is whether your attorney is set up for the moments that aren't on the calendar: a notice that arrives Friday afternoon, a candidate who needs a determination before an offer expires, a location change that already happened and needs to be resolved now. If you're not sure how your counsel handles those situations, find out before you need them to.
- ✓Your sponsorship policy reflects what you actually do today. Policies written when you had five sponsored employees often don't account for remote workers, out-of-country candidates, or the edge cases you've run into since. If yours hasn't been reviewed in the last year, it probably doesn't reflect how you're running things anymore. When the policy doesn't match practice, the first person who tries to follow it will get the wrong answer.
- ✓There's a documented handoff process between your team and immigration counsel. Not "we email them" -- a clear protocol: what information goes, in what format, when, and with what expected turnaround. Without that documentation, the handoff is where case details get lost and timelines slip before anyone realizes a step was skipped.
- ✓Your tracker reflects the current state of every active case. If someone opened it right now, would it show the correct work location for every remote employee? Would the next filing date still be accurate? Would every open case be there, including ones started in the last few weeks? If you're not sure, that's the answer.
- ✓Every stakeholder can name the immigration point of contact without hesitating. Ask three different hiring managers who to call with an immigration question. If you get different answers, or a pause before they respond, the point of contact isn't established in any meaningful way.
Pre-offer process
Pre-offer is where you have the most control. Mistakes here are visible because they affect candidates directly, and almost all of them are avoidable if your process is consistent.
- ✓The pre-offer review happens for internal transfers and rehires, not just new external hires. This is where your consistency usually breaks down. External hires get reviewed; internal moves often don't. An internal promotion to a different job classification, or a returning employee whose prior petition lapsed -- both need counsel's assessment before the offer goes out. "They're already here" doesn't hold for immigration purposes.
- ✓Hiring managers get a real briefing at the start of each sponsored search, not just a policy email. A short, role-specific conversation at the start of the search prevents most of the friction that comes later. Cover the realistic timeline for the visa type, what changes would complicate things, and where the start date can and can't flex. That conversation does more than any document.
- ✓Prevailing wage gets checked on salary changes, not just at the time of hire. The new hire check is standard. The gap is usually on your back end: a merit cycle, a market adjustment, a company-wide compensation review that moves someone below the prevailing wage for their role and location without triggering any immigration review. That salary change needs the same check as the original offer did.
- ✓Work location is confirmed before the petition is drafted. The LCA and petition are tied to a specific worksite. For remote employees, that means confirming the home address and metro area before counsel starts drafting. Discovering a location discrepancy after the petition is filed means refiling -- which delays the start date and usually surprises everyone involved.
Active case management
Once a case is filed, your job isn't done. Active cases require your attention at specific points, and these are the places where things slip when no one is watching closely.
- ✓Expiration reminders exist at multiple points, and someone verifies at each one that work is actually in progress. Setting a reminder and confirming that counsel has started intake are two different things. At the 90-day mark, you should be able to confirm that a filing date is on the calendar -- not just that an alert fired. The reminder is the trigger for that check, not a substitute for it.
- ✓Job changes, location changes, and salary adjustments route to immigration counsel before they take effect. You probably know these changes matter for immigration. What breaks down is your approval workflow: promotions, transfers, and relocations process through your systems without a step that connects to immigration review before the change goes through. That checkpoint has to be built into the workflow your managers use, not added as a reminder after something goes wrong.
- ✓Employees with travel plans are reaching counsel before they book, not after they land. Your employees book trips and mention it to you on the way out. For someone with a pending case, international travel can create consequences that aren't reversible. Build the habit in your sponsored population early: check with HR before booking international travel. It saves real problems down the road.
- ✓Government notices go to immigration counsel the same day they arrive. Anything from USCIS, DOL, or CBP needs to reach counsel immediately, not after someone on your team tries to read it over the weekend. The response window starts from the issue date. Everyone who handles your incoming mail or shared inbox needs to know to forward these without delay.
- ✓The green card conversation is happening in year 2 or 3, not when the employee brings it up in year 5. It keeps getting deferred because it feels like a big ask, or because the employee hasn't raised it yet. But for employees from backlogged countries, by year 4 or 5 the math often doesn't work anymore. Put this on your calendar proactively -- before it becomes a situation where there are no good options left.
Compliance operations
These are the items that look fine from where you're sitting and show up in audits. When they surface, they're almost always process failures -- your team knew the requirement, but your workflow didn't enforce it.
- ✓LCA posting is verified at every active worksite, including home offices. Posting at your main office gets done. The gap is your employees who work from home or split time between locations. Each worksite requires posting for ten consecutive business days. For home offices, electronic posting works if your company has an established system for it. If you have remote workers and haven't confirmed this location by location, go through the list.
- ✓Address changes in payroll trigger an immigration review for sponsored employees. One of your remote employees moves, updates their address in payroll, the change processes normally, and nobody tells immigration counsel. If the new city is in a different metro area from what's on the LCA, an amendment may have been required before they started working from there. This surfaces at the next extension filing -- months after the fact. The fix is connecting payroll address changes to an immigration flag for your sponsored employees.
- ✓I-9 reverification is tracked on its own schedule, separate from visa renewal. They're on different timelines, and conflating them creates problems in both directions. An employee with a pending H-1B extension may still have valid I-9 authorization under the automatic extension rule -- reverifying too early is wrong. But missing the actual reverification deadline when authorization lapses is a different problem. Keep two separate tracking columns in your tracker so these don't get confused.
- ✓There's a paper trail for compliance decisions, including the ones that turned out fine. When you find an issue, document when you found it and what you did. When you flag something to counsel, keep the record. In a DOL audit or an FDNS site visit, documentation that your program was actively managed matters. The absence of it makes even minor gaps look worse than they are.
Communication and visibility
You can have a solid process on your end and still have it break down because a hiring manager didn't know to call you before promoting someone. This is the part of running the program that's hardest to systematize and easiest to let slide.
- ✓Leadership understands what your immigration program requires to function. They see the invoices. They usually don't see the caseload, the lead times, or what happens when a deadline slips because no one was tracking it. Building that picture for them -- what's in flight, what it takes to manage it, what under-resourcing it actually costs -- is part of keeping your program funded at the level it needs.
- ✓Hiring managers know what to bring to you before they finalize anything. Your managers make decisions about promotions and work locations without thinking about immigration because no one told them to. A one-page reference for managers with sponsored direct reports -- what to run by you before announcing or finalizing -- is a small investment that prevents situations that are much harder to undo after the fact.
- ✓Sponsored employees know their case status and who to contact. When your sponsored employees don't know what's happening in their own case, they make assumptions. They book travel. They move cities without mentioning it. They accept a new title their manager announced before anyone talked to counsel. Regular, proactive check-ins with your sponsored population cut down on those surprises significantly.
- ✓Hiring manager knowledge gets refreshed, not just delivered once. People on your team change roles. A manager who was briefed on immigration two years ago doesn't necessarily remember what triggers a review. An annual refresh for anyone who regularly hires or manages your sponsored employees is a short conversation that catches a lot of situations before they reach you as problems.
Frequently asked questions
A monthly pass is the minimum for an active program. Check that expiration dates are current, work locations match what's on file with counsel, and next filing dates haven't slipped. Every quarter, reconcile against counsel's active case list to catch anything that wasn't added or has since closed. If a record in your tracker hasn't been touched in 30 days, look at it -- either the case is genuinely stalled or the record isn't being maintained.
Your attorney handles what gets surfaced to them. The pre-offer review that got skipped on an internal transfer, the location change that went through payroll without reaching counsel, the government notice that sat in your shared inbox -- none of those show up in the filing record. The check is in your own processes, not in the filing history. That's what this checklist is for.
Your law firm handles the legal work. Everything that makes sure the right information reaches them at the right time lives on your side. A good attorney works with what you give them. If a location change never gets reported, the petition gets filed with the wrong worksite. That's a process failure, not a legal one -- and it belongs to you to prevent.
Before a company-wide compensation change touches your sponsored employees, run it by immigration counsel. The concern goes both ways: a reduction that puts someone below prevailing wage for their role and location, or a restructuring that changes job classifications in ways that conflict with petition terms. It's a quick check and much easier to do before the adjustment goes out than to correct after.
They're on different schedules and need to be tracked separately. Your employee's H-1B extension might be pending, but they could still have valid I-9 work authorization under the automatic extension rule -- reverifying too early is wrong. On the other side, waiting until the visa renewal is finalized and then checking the I-9 may miss the actual reverification deadline. Keep two separate columns in your tracker so they don't get conflated.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult qualified immigration counsel before making decisions about your sponsored workforce.
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