EB5 Investors Magazine Volume 3 Issue 3 | Page 93

An Open Letter To USCIS From A Practicing EB-5 Economist On USCIS Guidance To Economic Inputs For Job Creation Studies by Scott Barnhart, PhD In a relatively rare event, on June 4, 2015 USCIS held a stakeholder call specifically addressing allowable project construction and pro-forma income budget items for EB-5 economic job creation modeling, i.e., “Expenses that are Includable (or Excludable) for Job Creation.” The event was rare because, in this practitioner’s nearly 9 years of experience conducting EB-5 job creation studies and business plans, USCIS has seldom provided specific guidance on any individual line item in construction/development budgets outside of that given in Requests for Evidence (RFE). USCIS indicated that the goal of the call was to reduce the number of RFEs and adjudication times by clarifying how adjudicators assess project budgets, which are the basic input used by the economist to conduct a job creation study. The guidance that USCIS economists provide is essential, and they should be commended for providing practitioners with valuable information that not only results in fewer RFEs, saving industry stakeholders crucial time and expense, but is likely to make economic results more consistent from one practitioner to the next. The purpose of this article is to briefly explain the most important aspects of the USCIS stakeholder call, which with one or two exceptions for most experienced EB-5 economists, was not too surprising. The article will then address some important questions that remain unanswered in an attempt to encourage USCIS to continue this type of useful interaction. The important issues for practitioners are not only avoiding RFEs to save time and expense, but also to ensure consistency from one economic study and practitioner to the next, which is crucial to project managers, regional centers, adjudicators/ regulators and especially foreign investors, whose future life as an immigrant crucially depends on the job creation results. Consistency across practitioners/economic reports should be a relatively easy objective to achieve considering most of the economic inputs and project types are similar. Some specific examples of what might aid all involved in this industry are provided below, but the message conveyed in this article is that more guidance from USCIS is preferred to less, provided this guidance is reasonable, follows economic logic, and is responsive to feedback given by stakeholder practitioners. The goal should be to have guidelines that lead to sound, conservative and realistic job creation estimates such that if several experienced professionals in the field analyzed a given project independently, each practitioner would obtain results that are not dramatically different. The June 4th stakeholder call started with a prepared statement discussing, among other things, hard and soft construction Continued to page 92 WWW.EB5INVESTORS.COM 91