Project Firewall: DOL No Longer Needs a Complaint to Investigate Your H-1B Program

The public access file is the cheapest way in

Here is the operational point most employers underweight.

A Secretary-initiated investigation has to start somewhere, and the public access file is the least expensive place to look. It requires no subpoena and no site visit. It must be available to any member of the public who asks. And a PAF deficiency that "impedes the ability of the Administrator to determine whether a violation has occurred, or the ability of members of the public to have information needed to file a complaint" carries a civil money penalty of up to $2,364.

The penalty amount is not what should concern you. What should concern you is that a PAF audit is the front door, and a disorganized PAF is an invitation to walk through it.

The file must be assembled within one working day of LCA filing and must contain the certified LCA, documentation of the wage rate paid, the prevailing wage determination and its source, documentation of notice (posting or electronic), a summary of benefits offered to U.S. workers in similar positions, and (for H-1B dependent or willful violator employers) the additional non-displacement and recruitment attestations.

Two failure modes recur in our practice:

Decentralized filing. LCAs certified by different offices or outside counsel over several years, with no single custodian. Nobody can produce a complete file on demand because no complete file exists in one place.

Wage documentation that does not match reality. The PAF documents the rate on the LCA; payroll shows something else, usually because of a role change, a location change, or a deduction nobody flagged as a wage issue. Each mismatch is a potential willful violation at up to $9,624, and where a U.S. worker was displaced within the ninety days before or after filing, up to $67,367.

The full penalty structure

These amounts are unchanged from 2025. OMB cancelled the government-wide 2026 inflation adjustment in April, because the October 2025 CPI-U data was never produced during the lapse in appropriations. Any source quoting you higher 2026 figures is wrong.

The multi-agency posture is the real story

Project Firewall coordinates DOL's Office of Immigration Policy, ETA, and Wage and Hour with the DOJ Civil Rights Division, the EEOC, and USCIS. That is the detail general counsels should sit with.

It means a wage-and-hour finding can become a discrimination referral. It means a DOL investigation can surface facts that support a USCIS revocation. And it means the "immigration compliance" question is no longer contained within the immigration function.

The same convergence is visible in enforcement outcomes. The DOJ's Immigrant and Employee Rights Section spent 2026 pursuing discrimination against U.S. workers, culminating in a $3.2 million settlement with OpenAI and Statsig in August 2026 over PERM recruitment practices: the positions were not advertised on the external careers site, applicants were required to apply on paper, and roles were advertised by late-night radio. And in a criminal matter that shows where the ceiling is, a Florida construction executive received 48 months and over $55 million in restitution in a case that began with undocumented labor and ended in payroll tax evasion, workers' compensation fraud, and a worker's death.

The immigration violation is increasingly the entry point, not the endpoint.

What to do this quarter

1. Audit every public access file against the checklist above. Confirm one custodian, one location, complete for every LCA filed in the past year plus the required retention period.
2. Reconcile PAF wage documentation against actual payroll, employee by employee. Investigate every mismatch before someone else does.
3. Review your benching exposure. Identify every H-1B employee who has been in nonproductive status and confirm they were paid.
4. Audit your termination process. For every H-1B separation in the past two years, confirm USCIS notice, LCA withdrawal, and the return transportation offer.
5. Confirm every worksite on every active LCA matches where the employee actually works. Remote and hybrid arrangements adopted since 2020 have quietly invalidated a great many LCAs.
6. Treat a DOL inquiry as a multi-agency event from the first letter. Involve counsel before responding, and preserve privilege on the internal review.

The employers who fare worst in Secretary-initiated investigations are not the ones with the most violations. They are the ones who cannot produce a coherent file, and therefore cannot tell their own story.