San Jose staffing firm co-owner pleads guilty to H-1B visa fraud scheme
A Santa Clara man pleaded guilty this week to fraud for illegally obtaining H-1B visas to use for his company that provides workers for Bay Area technology firms.
Kishore Dattapuram, 55, entered his guilty plea Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose. Along with two other men, Santosh Giri of San Jose, and Kumar Aswapathi, of Austin, Texas, Dattapuram was charged in 2019 with 10 counts of visa fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit visa fraud. Aswapathi, 55, pleaded guilty to all counts in 2020, and Giri, 48, pleaded guilty to all counts last month. The men face prison and fines.
Dattapuram and Aswapathi owned San Jose staffing company Nanosemantics, which received a commission for workers placed at clients’ companies, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release Wednesday. Giri worked closely with Nanosemantics and owned LexGiri, an outsourcing firm providing visa and immigration services for the legal industry, the department said.
Nanosemantics, according to the department, regularly applied to obtain H-1B visas, which are intended for foreign workers with specialized skills.
The H-1B has become a political flashpoint in America’s immigration debates. Silicon Valley technology giants use the visa to obtain top talent, but also employ many lower-skilled H-1B workers indirectly via staffing companies. While the technology industry pushes for an expansion to the 85,000 annual cap on new H-1B visas, critics point to abuses including replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders, including at UC San Francisco.
The most recent research, by the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored advocacy group, showed nearly 60,000 foreign citizens on the H-1B, the vast majority from India, were approved to work for Bay Area companies in 2019.
Companies apply for the visa on behalf of specific workers, and by law, a job must be waiting for any worker named on an application.
“Dattapuram admitted to working with Aswapathi and Giri to submit fraudulent H-1B applications that falsely represented that foreign workers had specific jobs waiting for them at designated end-client companies when in fact the jobs did not exist,” the department said. “On multiple occasions, Dattapuram paid companies to be listed as end-clients for the foreign workers, even though he knew the workers would never work for those employers.”
The three men admitted they schemed to obtain visas to keep workers in reserve and place them with clients when jobs came up, “giving Nanosemantics an unfair advantage over its competitors,” the department said.
Dattapuram and Giri are to go before Judge Edward J. Davila in San Jose U.S. District Court in February for sentencing. Aswapathi has a sentencing-related hearing later this month. All face prison time and fines.
Last month, a jury found that Cognizant, one of the world’s largest staffing firms and a supplier of thousands of workers for Silicon Valley’s technology industry and other Bay Area employers, intentionally discriminated against non-Indian workers. The verdict came in a lawsuit in Los Angeles U.S. District Court that included allegations from a fired Cognizant worker that he was forced to sign hundreds of fraudulent letters supporting H-1B applications for jobs that didn’t exist. The letters were part of Cognizant’s scheme to secure vast numbers of H-1B visas and build a “robust inventory” of Indian nationals to be placed in U.S. companies when opportunities arose, the lawsuit alleged.