Two Silicon Valley executives charged with H-1B visa fraud

A pair of executives at a Silicon Valley info know-how agency appeared in court docket this week on fees of H-1B visa fraud allegedly dedicated over the course of a decade, federal prosecutors stated.

Elangovan Punniakoti, 52, and Mary Christeena, 47, have been every charged March 31 with one rely of conspiracy to commit visa fraud and 6 counts of visa fraud. They appeared in federal court docket for the primary time Tuesday.

Punniakoti and Christeena have been the chief govt and president, respectively, of Santa Clara County-based Innovate Options Inc., which was included in 2008.

Between 2010 and 2020 the pair submitted 54 fraudulent H-1B visa purposes, sponsoring employees for positions that didn’t exist, in accordance with the U.S. legal professional’s workplace for the Northern District of California.

As an alternative, the employees have been, in impact, lent out to different firms that paid greater than $2.5 million in charges to Innovate Options to cowl the prices of employees’ wages and salaries and a revenue markup.

The H-1B program permits employers to rent overseas employees briefly for “specialty occupations” positioned in the USA and is a crucial useful resource for American tech firms, which import a lot of their coding and engineering expertise.

This system requires that employers fill out an utility for the brand new rent, detailing and testifying to the existence and particulars of the job and its length and wages. The employer then fills out one other petition, once more offering and testifying to the wages and site of the job.

In some instances, an applicant reminiscent of Innovate Options can submit a petition on behalf of one other firm, referred to as an end-client, the place the H-1B worker would work.

Punniakoti and Christeena allegedly submitted documentation stating that the employees could be employed at Innovate Options or offsite at end-client firms.

However the inner jobs at Innovate Options didn’t exist, prosecutors alleged, and the employees stated to be working offsite by no means arrived on the different firms.

“The tip-client firms listed within the Innovate Options’ H-1B purposes both by no means acquired the proposed H-1B employees or by no means meant to obtain these H-1B employees,” federal prosecutors stated within the indictment.

As an alternative, in accordance with the indictment, Punniakoti and Christeena submitted purposes for H-1B employees who could be positioned with different employers that had work for them, not with the end-clients within the purposes.

“Via this scheme, the defendants reaped income and gained an unfair benefit over employment-staffing companies,” prosecutors stated.

The fees come a yr after President Biden allowed the expiration of a ban on H-1B visas, implement by then-President Trump within the early days of the pandemic.

If convicted, Punniakoti and Christeena may face 5 years in jail for the conspiracy cost and 10-year sentences for every rely of fraud, along with a $250,000 advantageous for every cost.