New travel policy for employees unveiled

Infosys has come out with a detailed policy for employees travelling to the US on H1-B and L1 visa, said sources. This comes as the industry has seen an increase in visa rejection.

According to company officials, Infosys has reviewed its current practices and established a comprehensive policy and procedures to which every employee must adhere. The 24-page document, is titled “Business Visitor Travels to the US: An Employee Guide to Company Policy and Procedures” clearly mentions what an employee can do on the said visa.

Senior Vice-Prisedent and Group Head HR Nandita Gurjar confirmed the development. “Earlier we did have a verbal guideline but now we have documented it to ensure all employees adhere to it.” She, however, denied this has anything to do with the firms legal battle on visa misuse in the US Federal courts.

Some of the aspect that the document talks about include functions like project planning, requirement gathering, knowledge gathering, high-level designing.

The document contains an exhaustive list of authorised activities with explanatory remarks about the impermissible actions in each activity area. For instance, project planning activities (eg, developing plans or blueprints) for a project will be completed outside the US and is not to be begun by the visitor while he or she is in the US. Project planning for a project that will be undertaken in the US is not permissible.

The moves comes after Infosys was pulled up by the US federal courts for the misuse of B1 visa. One of its employees had alleged the company sent low-level employees from India to the US to work in full-time posts at its customer sites against the immigration laws.

With regard to high-level designing it says: To arrive at functional breakdown of the system such as process flows, data objects and database flows etc and defining the operating environment for projects primarily to be performed outside of U.S. at a future date.

This detailed designing of database, software components is not appropriate by the business visitor while he or she is in the US.

Meanwhile, the Indian IT industry has been facing increasing difficulties in getting H1 and L1 visas. According to a CLSA report, the visa rejection rates in US are currently running at almost 40 per cent, up from 5 per cent, 18 months back.