A Bloomberg investigation has revealed a major fraud in the H-1B visa lottery system. It links Indian American Kandi Srinivasa Reddy to manipulating the system, but he denies the allegations.
The report shows that staffing and outsourcing companies have been exploiting the H-1B visa lottery system. In 2023, 446,000 people applied for H-1B visas, but only about 85,000 were available. Over 11,600 visas went to multinational outsourcing companies, and another 22,600 went to IT staffing firms.
Bloomberg’s investigation found that nearly half of the H-1Bs went to these companies, many of which cheated by submitting multiple entries for the same worker. This practice, known as “multiple registration,” enhances their chances of securing a visa. The USCIS calls this “fraud.”
Between 2020 and 2023, about 15,500 visas were obtained through such fraudulent means. One staffing firm operator used up to a dozen companies to submit the same applicants multiple times, acquiring hundreds of visas while many others were left without.
Kandi Srinivasa Reddy, who came to the US in the early 2000s and earned a master’s degree, started his own company, Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC, in 2013. Bloomberg’s investigation found that Reddy controlled several entities that submitted multiple applications for the same workers, resulting in over 3,000 entries and securing hundreds of visas since 2020.
In one year alone, Reddy’s firms accounted for more than 300 successful H-1B applications. After winning an H-1B, Reddy’s company rented the workers to corporations like Meta and HSBC. The company’s advertisements claimed that it collected 20% or 30% of the worker’s pay, amounting to $15,000 or more each year.
Lucas Garritson, a Texas lawyer representing Reddy, told Bloomberg that some of the companies’ visas had been challenged by the USCIS. However, he argued that the agency hadn’t followed proper procedures for prohibiting the activity and didn’t have proof that Reddy’s companies broke the rules.
The USCIS originally designed the H-1B system to allocate visas on a first-come, first-served basis but switched to a lottery system due to overwhelming demand. Each year, the lottery randomly draws names from the pool of applicants, which has nearly doubled in recent years, making it harder to secure a visa.
