We are pleased to announce that as of Monday, April 23, 2018, our office has begun receiving receipt notices for the H-1B’s we have submitted for the FY 2019 cap. Typically, we will receive additional receipt notices for at least the next few weeks.
For this past month, we have received many phone calls and inquiries from our clients regarding the lottery selection process. We would like to share with our readers one trick you can do to see if you have been selected for the lottery a week, or even sometimes two weeks before the actual receipt notice arrives:
If you keep a close eye on your bank account, when you see the filing fee check amount of either $1,710 or $2,460 cashed, this means that your case was selected for the lottery. If your bank offers digital scans of your cashed checks, you can even look at the back of the check to see a stamp with your future receipt notice number on it. By doing this, you will know one to two weeks before receiving the receipt notice that you have been selected for the lottery.
If for some reason it is difficult to ascertain whether a check is been cashed in your employer’s account there is one additional trick available to F-1/OPT students. Once a case is selected for the lottery, the SEVIS system is updated with the ID number and receipt number of the student who was selected. Oftentimes you can contact your Designated School Official for an update on the SEVIS system and get a faster update on your lottery selection.
For both methods above, the check cashing and the SEVIS update appear to happen on the same day in nearly all cases so one method is no faster than the other.
Hopefully, one of the methods above can give you a sneak preview to your lottery selection. Fok Immigration Law wishes you the best of luck during the rest of the lottery selection process!