BALCA Affirms Denial of Labor Cert for Technical Violation in Supervised Recruitment

In Matter of JP Morgan Chase & Co. (see Decision 2011-PER-00635), the Board of Alien Labor Certification Appeals (BALCA) upheld the denial of a labor certification application filed by JP Morgan Chase for a vice president of mergers and acquisition because the company noted that addresses of applicants were included in their resumes instead of listing them as required. The BALCA noted that the regulation required the employer to “state” the addresses of the U.S. workers who applied for the job opportunity on the recruitment report itself and does not permit addresses to be incorporated by reference to other documents within the administrative file. Moreover, the employer appeared to have assumed that all of the applicants stated their address on their resumes, but there were a few resumes where no address was stated.

The BALCA acknowledged that some omissions may not be material to the review of the substance of an application. In this case, however, the BALCA found the reference to the resumes a “wholesale failure to provide an element of a report directly mandated by the regulations.”

The BALCA also noted that the selection of the case for supervised recruitment “puts the employer on notice that special scrutiny is being placed on the application.” Among other things, the recruitment report required under supervised recruitment is more detailed than the recruitment report required under basic labor certification processing. Simply put, the BALCA said, an employer “cannot shift the burden to the [Certifying Officer] to look through resumes to find the addresses of U.S. applicants.”