Does a USCIS A-Number Change? What Actually Changes on New Cards
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On September 8, 2026, Department of Labor Office of Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito announced on X that his office had suspended new PERM labor-certification filings for two technology employers, Cognizant and Cloudera. The action is one of the first concrete enforcement steps to come out of the nationwide H-1B and PERM fraud investigation DOL OIG launched July 8, 2026. No criminal charges have been filed as of the September Mayer Brown alert tracking the enforcement wave.
A DOL PERM freeze does not change anyone's Form I-9 today, and it does not make a current H-1B worker unauthorized. Immigration counsel is fielding the question because ICE Notices of Inspection are still issued against I-9 records, not against a sponsor's PERM file, and because the sponsor of an H-1B workforce and the client company that uses those workers on site carry different obligations under 8 CFR § 274a. The sponsor of the H-1B workers is one employer for I-9 purposes. The client company that uses them on site is a different one. Neither has to touch a Form I-9 because of the freeze. This article walks the delta. It is the third in a September series covering DHS and DOL activity on the same population, alongside our pieces on the proposed elimination of the 60-day grace period and the proposed $103,265 H-1B cap-subject fee.
The July 8 investigation announcement described "widespread schemes" involving fraudulent applications, wage-kickback arrangements, and benching, and asked workers and other insiders with information to report it to DOL OIG. The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is participating. Two months of subpoenas later, the September 8 PERM suspensions arrived. The authority DOL is using sits in 20 CFR § 656.31, which allows PERM applications to be held "until completion of any investigation." No DOL press release followed the announcement, and the freeze was disclosed only through the Inspector General's post.
Several outlets described the action as "visa filings" being suspended or "H-1B processing" being halted. That is not what the record shows. PERM is the DOL labor-certification step that comes before an employer-sponsored green-card petition, and the freeze covers new PERM applications filed by the named employers. Existing H-1B status is untouched. Already-approved or previously filed PERM cases are not automatically canceled. Extensions and amendments filed with USCIS run on their own USCIS timeline.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Action | Administrative hold on new PERM labor-certification filings |
| Announced | September 8, 2026, by DOL OIG Inspector General Anthony D'Esposito on X |
| Authority cited | 20 CFR § 656.31 (PERM filings may be suspended until an investigation completes) |
| Underlying investigation | DOL OIG nationwide H-1B and PERM fraud probe launched July 8, 2026 |
| Employers named | Cognizant (IT services) and Cloudera (data software) |
| Not affected | Current H-1B status. Already-filed or approved PERM cases. H-1B extensions and amendments. Any employer's Form I-9 or E-Verify obligations. |
| Formal charges | None as of the September 2026 Mayer Brown alert |
| Duration | Not published |
That is the whole of what happened. Every I-9 question that follows comes from the fact that the workers named in the freeze also sit on a payroll somewhere, and payroll runs the Form I-9.
The confusion is almost always about who owns which file. A large IT-services vendor like Cognizant is the sponsor for its own H-1B workforce. It runs its own I-9s, its own E-Verify cases, and its own reverification calendar. Its client companies do not I-9 those workers. M-274 §2.0 is direct on this. You do not complete a Form I-9 for someone "employed by a contractor providing contract services (such as employee leasing or temporary agencies) and are providing labor to you."
The M-274 sentence that follows the exemption is the one client-company counsel keeps in mind. "You may not use a contract, subcontract, or exchange to obtain the labor or services of an employee you know is unauthorized to work." INA §274A(a)(4) codifies that hook. A public investigation of a vendor is not that knowledge. A frozen PERM queue is not that knowledge. Knowledge of unauthorized status is knowledge of a specific worker's specific status, and the good-faith I-9 defense at M-274 FAQ 14 Q3 turns on whether the government can prove it.
| Role | Completes the Form I-9? | What the freeze does to that file |
|---|---|---|
| H-1B and PERM sponsor (the vendor) | Yes, for its own employees | Nothing changes today. The clock is still the expiration date recorded in Section 1 and Section 2. Supplement B runs when that date hits. |
| Client company using vendor contractors on site | No | Nothing changes, unless the client acquires actual knowledge that a specific worker is unauthorized. A PERM freeze is not that knowledge. |
| Client that hires the worker directly onto its own payroll | Yes | Treat it the way you treat any H-1B hire. Run the expiration date, reverify on Supplement B, do not reopen E-Verify at reverification. |
The table above is the entire employer-of-record split. What follows is what changes on your side of that split, and what does not.
The freeze is not on the list of triggers that move Section 2 or force Supplement B. The list has not changed. Reverification runs off the expiration date the employee wrote in Section 1 and, if applicable, the List A document date recorded in Section 2. Reverification is never required when a U.S. passport, U.S. passport card, Permanent Resident Card, or List B document expires, and never for U.S. citizens or noncitizen nationals. Everything else, our reverification facts piece walks through in detail.
Two mechanics keep sponsors out of trouble when a specific H-1B worker's approval is running down. The first is 8 CFR § 274a.12(b)(20), the 240-day rule. A timely-filed extension of stay filed with USCIS before the current period expires carries continued work authorization for up to 240 days while the petition is pending. The freeze is on PERM at DOL, so the 240-day rule (which lives with USCIS on the H-1B side) still applies. The second is Supplement B itself. Fill it in when the recorded expiration hits, using a fresh List A or List C document the employee chooses.
Two mechanics do not save anyone. E-Verify is not a reverification tool, and rerunning a case on an existing worker in response to a public enforcement action against the vendor creates a discrimination record without producing a compliance answer. A client company that completes "backup" I-9s on vendor contractors produces a paper trail suggesting it treated those workers as its own employees. That is not a defense. It is an exhibit.
The freeze does not end anyone's employment. A separate wave might. If a client company drops the vendor contract, or the vendor rebalances an engagement and lays workers off, the I-9 conversation moves from reverification onto the offboarding side. Today's rule at 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2) still gives most employment-based nonimmigrants (E, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, O-1, TN, and their dependents) up to 60 days to be picked up by a new sponsor or depart. The DHS Notice of Proposed Rulemaking published September 11 would eliminate that bridge. Comments close November 10, 2026. Nothing changes until DHS publishes a final rule with an effective date, but the calendar for planning has moved.
For the sponsor, the practical read is that the reverification calendar and the offboarding calendar now need to be looked at together. A worker whose H-1B ends because the project ended is a different Section 2 story than a worker whose H-1B ends because the I-94 hit its date. Today, both get 60 days. Under the proposal, only the second one might.
Constructive knowledge at 8 CFR § 274a.1(l) trips employers in two opposite directions after a public enforcement action against a sponsor. The first is overreading. A DOL investigation into a sponsor's PERM recruitment gets treated as constructive knowledge that specific contracted workers are unauthorized, and used to justify pulling contractors off site or demanding fresh documents from the vendor. That is not what the regulation covers. Constructive knowledge is knowledge a reasonable employer should have based on the facts about a specific worker (an expired document the employer failed to reverify, a Social Security no-match letter that went unresolved). A DOL investigation into a company's PERM recruitment process is not, by itself, information about any particular worker's employment authorization.
The second is underreading. Running a "special audit" of workers by national origin, or singling out the vendor's badges for a fresh document request, hits the anti-discrimination provisions the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section (IER) at DOJ enforces. The employee still chooses which List A or List B and C combination to present. The employer still cannot demand a specific document. National origin, citizenship status, and immigration status all sit inside the same prohibition at INA §274B. A public investigation of an employer does not lift any of it.
The last piece of the confusion is jurisdictional. DOL OIG is not ICE. A DOL subpoena into PERM recruitment records is a labor-certification investigation. An ICE Notice of Inspection is an I-9 audit. Different agency, different statute, different file. The two can happen at the same employer in the same year, and neither one is a preview of the other.
If an NOI arrives, the playbook is the one we've published. Freeze the file room. Call counsel. Produce the I-9s inside the three-business-day window (or the extension counsel negotiates), organized to match what the NOI asks for. Do not backdate a correction, do not white out an old entry, and do not refile a form that was never signed on time. Post-March 2026, the substantive vs. technical line moved, and paperwork corrections that were once safe are now the finding letter. Current penalty exposure runs $288–$2,861 per Form I-9 for paperwork violations and $716–$28,619 per worker for knowing hires under the January 2025 Federal Register adjustments (see I-9 Penalties 2026).
The audit-ready version of the vendor question is a list of names and dates, not a stack of vendor I-9s. Our compliance team can pull the H-1B, H-4 EAD, and other expiring List A populations out of your I-9 book, sort them by classification and upcoming reverification date, and show you which ones are your obligation and which ones are your vendor's. Schedule a free compliance call, or request an I-9 audit if the book has grown through acquisitions or an HRIS switch.
The freeze is a DOL enforcement story. The most useful thing counsel can do is stop the client from creating an I-9 story on top of it.
"The employer-of-record split does the work. If those workers were never your employees, their I-9s were never your records to keep. What we pull for the client is the H-1B and H-4 EAD populations they actually hired, sorted by the reverification date the I-9 already carries. That list existed before any enforcement action. An enforcement action against a sponsor is a reason to open it," says Patricia Duarte, Director of Compliance at i9 Intelligence.
No. The freeze holds new PERM labor certifications at DOL. PERM is the recruitment-based labor-certification step that precedes an employment-based green-card petition. It does not revoke H-1B status, cancel a filed or approved PERM case, or affect any I-9 or E-Verify obligation.
No. M-274 §2.0 says you do not complete Form I-9 for employees of a contractor providing contract services or labor to you. The vendor completes those I-9s. Creating "backup" I-9s on vendor contractors suggests you treated them as your employees, which is the opposite of the argument you want on file.
Only if you know a specific worker is unauthorized to work and you keep using that labor through the contract. INA §274A(a)(4) treats that as a hire in violation of §274A(a)(1)(A). A public investigation of the vendor is not the same as knowledge about any specific worker.
No. E-Verify runs at hire (and, for federal contractors covered by FAR clause 52.222-54, on the covered existing-employee population). It is not a reverification tool, and it is not a legally supported response to a DOL OIG action. Rerunning cases on selected workers because a vendor made the news creates a discrimination record.
PERM is the green-card step, not the H-1B extension. Timely-filed H-1B extension petitions still carry continued work authorization for up to 240 days while pending under 8 CFR § 274a.12(b)(20). Reverify on Supplement B from the expiration date recorded in the I-9.
Produce your own I-9s inside three business days, in the form the NOI asks for. Do not edit any record before it goes out. A DOL OIG investigation into a vendor's PERM filings is a separate case at a separate agency. Our ICE audit walkthrough covers the production and findings-letter sequence in detail.
Reach the i9 Intelligence compliance team Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm CT.