L-1A Extension One-Day Approval

Petitioner: Distributor of Nutritional Ingredients

Beneficiary: Chinese National

Position: President and CEO

Number of Employees: 6 + 1 part time (including beneficiary and beneficiary’s spouse)

BACKGROUND

Mr. Wong filed for an extension of his original L-1A status as an intracompany transferee executive or manager. He previously served in his capacity as President and CEO of the subsidiary of a Chinese nutritional ingredients distributor, and wished to continue his service in said capacity.

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Initially, we believed that it would be difficult to prove Mr. Wong’s managerial or executive capacity seeing as the company only had a total number of 6 employees and one part time employee. On top of this, one of these employees only worked part time, and they all had relatively low salaries. However, by carefully detailing every employee’s job duties and percentage of time allocated to certain tasks, we were able to demonstrate that Mr. Wong’s subordinate employees were sufficient to take care of the day-by-day operations of the company so he wouldn’t have to. We therefore demonstrated that Mr. Wong’s duties were focused on purely executive and managerial functions, by helping him in collecting and documenting his employment assignment letter, work reports, organizational chart, and company business plan.

This was a challenging task, as the original company in China underwent a name change while several former employees filed lawsuits against the U.S. company. Despite all this, we were effectively able to connect the American company with the Chinese company and we held weekly conferences with our client to ensure that the company was running according to the plan set before us, even remaining on standby for any L-1A fraud investigation.

Additionally, we were concerned that the company did not grow as expected in the original L-1A filing. However, in the filing, we focused on the fact that growth did occur, and that the company was a real enterprise in order to demonstrate that it was doing business. We were able to do this by demonstrating to the officer’s satisfaction that Mr. Wong had a managerial position within the Chinese parent company on top of being the executive in the U.S. company.

OUTCOME

Our client’s L-1A extension was accepted and approved in 1 day. No request for evidence was issued. The client was extremely thankful because several of his colleagues in the same industry had their L-1A cases denied even when their companies were more profitable and had more employees.