- The DOL is working on 3 major administrative and system enhancements: 1) Rolling out larger-scale supervised recruitment from the Atlanta National Processing Center by October 1, 2009; 2) Centralizing processing of all prevailing wage determinations; and 3) Centralizing all help-desk functions to the national Office of Foreign Labor Certification in Washington, D.C.
- The PERM section of the new iCERT Portal is not expected to take effect until September 2009.
- Statistics on PERM processing: About 58,000 applications are currently pending. 54% are under final review, 38% are in audits, 6% are on appeal, and the rest are undergoing business verification checks.
- For supervised recruitment: 25% of the cases are withdrawn, 45% are denied, 11% are certified and 20% are pending.
The processing numbers are interesting. One of the three main administrative goals is to roll out a larger scale "supervised recruitment" and 45% of all supervised recruitment cases are denied. What does this mean? Well, the numbers speak for themselves.
There is a good news/bad news item in these updates. The centralized processing of all prevailing wages will allow for standardization of the process and employers with offices across the United States will know what to expect in each state. Unfortunately, when the DOL moves from local processing to national processing, you inevitably lose the connection and ability to have questions answered as to why a particular position has come in at a higher or lower wage than anticipated. In many situations, working with a local officer allowed for lines of communication to remain open. When the PERM process was introduced in 2005 we saw a major breakdown in those lines of communications and we expect further erosion with the nationalization of prevailing wage determinations.
