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Industry Standards or Benchmarks
Some industries, like the transportation and logistics industries, for example, benefit from the availability of industry
benchmarks published by independent third parties, such as
an association or industry consultants. Industry benchmarks
can be extremely valuable in helping to justify a given project’s
projections for both costs and expenses. However, one of the
challenges of using industry benchmarks is being able to explain
how the EB-5 project in question will be able to attain performance levels akin to the benchmark level as a new entrant to
the market.
Team Industry Expertise
In many cases, EB-5 projects are started by highly experienced
teams who have a considerable amount of industry expertise.
While in a ‘normal’, non-EB-5 business plan, this expertise
could be considered sufficient justification for projections, in
EB-5 this is not always the case. In the eyes of USCIS, team
members who are employed (or will be employed) by the company in question have a vested interest in portraying a strong
view of the viability and potential success of the business and are
therefore not always accepted as a valid basis for assumptions. If
one is going to rely on the expertise of members of their team to
justify projections and key assumptions, the expertise of these
team members should be validated with an explanation of their
experience in the industry.
Ideally, anyone preparing an EB-5 business plan will have had
the benefit of working with many EB-5 attorneys, economists
and other practitioners and as a result, will have been exposed
to a wide breadth of knowledge, interpretations of the law and
RFE information in order to save the headaches that may arise
from missing important details.
Avoiding the Compounded RFE
Several professionals in the EB-5 industry have observed with
some degree of consistency the phenomenon that we will refer
to here as the compounded RFE (also ۛ