In April, USCIS announced on its website that the agency would start auditing active regional centers per the requirements of the EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 (RIA). According to USCIS, each designated regional center must be audited, “at least once every five years.” Additionally, USCIS noted that any regional center that, “deliberately attempts to impede the audit,” will be terminated per INA 203(b)(5)(E)(vii)(III). Based on updates from IIUSA’s membership, certain regional centers started to receive audit notices from USCIS in May this year. Now, preparing for an audit from USCIS has become an ongoing and critical part of regional centers’ operations in 2024 and beyond.
Although USCIS has created a new EB-5 Regional Center Audits webpage, there is little information available for regional centers to prepare for the audits. IIUSA started to compile a new database in hopes to inform our industry of the latest developments on this important topic. We invite each regional center to share with your trade association the audit notice(s) that you received from USCIS.
Based on the initial data that IIUSA received from our members, we noticed that the most common documents that USCIS requests for an audit include:
- Information on the regional center’s principal(s), management team, supporting staff, and consultants;
- Information on the regional center, including organizational chart, by-laws, ownership, operating agreements, etc.;
- Physical and mailing addresses for the NCE(s), JCE(s), and EB-5 project(s) associated with the regional center;
- Information on any pending material litigation or bankruptcy, or material adverse judgments or bankruptcy orders issued during the most recent 10-year period;
- Information on the regional center’s marketing strategies, methods used for promotional relationship building, etc.;
- Documentation to show the flow of EB-5 investor funds for the past 24 months;
- Database and methods to track investor data, investments, and investment performance;
- … and more!
As of today, IIUSA has only received this critical data from a few key members, so the sample size in our database is limited. However, with your participation, we are confident that our database will become more representative, helping to inform the regional center industry of the latest trends in USCIS audits.
How to share your data?
Sharing your data is easy. Simply send audit notice(s) that you receive from USCIS to Lee Li, IIUSA Director of Policy Research and Data Analytics, at lee.li@iiusa.org. If you prefer not to share the actual audit notice(s), you can also fill out this questionnaire and send it back to IIUSA, providing us with the data we need for our database. Should you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to Lee using the email address above or give us a call at 202-795-9662.
Will my data be kept confidential?
We fully respect the privacy of your data. All of the information that you send to IIUSA will be kept confidential and will not be shared with anyone outside of IIUSA’s staff without your consent. IIUSA will only analyze the data you provided and publish reports and analysis on the aggregated trends on regional center audits.
