On Friday, October 2, the American Immigration Lawyers Association held a Fall Conference in Pittsburgh, PA to discuss complex corporate immigration issues, including — what’s going on with PERM these days?!?
Mike Hammond, a featured presenter on Appellate & Litigation topics, reported that following statistics given by AILA Liaisons during the Corporate PERM panel:
- Atlanta DOL has approximately 65,000 pending cases;
- Approximately 34,000 are in Final Review (non-audited, regular processing);
- Approximately 24,000 cases are in the Audit Queue and they are working on cases filed in October 2007;
- There are approximately 3,000 cases in appeal and DOL gives an average processing time of 18 months to review appeals.
(**Note, the figures provided do not actually add up to 65,000 — however these were the figures given during the presentation. Hopefully they did not lose the other 4,000 cases!)
Other important notes from this presentation included DOL revising their “goal processing time” from a matter of weeks to one year of processing time for the average case in final review.
DOL has all but said that there is no timeframe for implementing the new PERM form in the near future — they did not commit to when it would be implemented but said that it would likely be years, not months before the new form becomes a requirement.
Also the panel reported that PERM cases have started moving again, after a mysterious 6 months halt to adjudications. We can confirm that this rumor is true based on several PERM approvals that came to our office last week.
Stay tuned for more on PERM and thanks Mike for bringing us this juicy info!