04/05/2007: What Does Refund Checks from USCIS for FY 2008 H-1B Cap Filing?
There are a growing number of reports from the H-1B cap filers beginning from late yesterday that they started receiving "refund" of filing fees from the CSC or VSC. These are the cases of the petitioners whose filing fee checks have been cashed by the Service Centers. We do not know whether this news implies that the USCIS has completed the job of sorting-out and data-enties for all the cases and the random selection process has commenced. Assuming otherwise, one wonders how they have decided that these cases have been not selected and the filing fees should be refunded. There are two theories as to how the random selection would be conducted. Obviously, the entire cases should be data-entried before they can start a random selection process. Otherwise, the random selection process will be not scientic and too arbitrary. But no one knows. One theory is that in order to make the data entries, they should take the filing fees and the payment of these fees will have to be refunded for those which fail to make it. Other theory is that the checks will not be deposited until the selections are made. Currently the process of random selection remains a mystery. However, the fact that refund checks started being mailed out may indicate that the first theory is more likely than the second theory, and there is a possibility that the random selection is made by the computer during the process of data entry rather than after completion of data-entries of the entire cases. Since they had only opened and sorted out a little of 34,000 cases, it may be hard to believe that yesday they could have completed sorting out of the entire remaining cases in one day. Please stay tuned to this website for the development of H-1B lottery results.