Telangana Congress leader's name comes up in H1-B visa lottery rigging row, he calls it 'false propaganda'

Hyderabad: Kandi Srinivasa Reddy, a Congress leader from Telangana and an Indian-American businessman who unsuccessfully contested from Adilabad in the previous year's Assembly elections, has now been embroiled in a controversy surrounding 'rigging' of the highly sought-after H-1B visa in the USA.

An investigative report by business news major Bloomberg pointed out that Srinivas Reddy had operated through a complex maze of several inter-connected staffing firms in the USA to corner the majority of H-1B visas by allegedly exploiting flaws in the visa lottery, while other US businesses and talented immigrants lost out.

The Bloomberg report revealed Srinivasa Reddy's involvement in the US-flagged scheme and how his companies collaborated to win more than 300 H-1Bs since 2020.

Quoting a report by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the report said a group of 13 related companies worked in concert to exploit a new rule of H-1B.

The report said that the data, which cover lotteries conducted from 2020 through 2023, shed new light on a form of cheating that became rampant in recent years. Referred to as “multiple registration,” the tactic involved submitting more than one lottery entry for the same person to boost their chances, a manoeuvre that federal officials describe as “fraud.”

Bloomberg estimated that roughly 15,500 visas—about one out of every six awarded last year—were obtained by 'gaming' the lottery in this way. Over a four-year period, one staffing firm operator used a dozen companies to enter the same applicants as many as 15 times, securing hundreds of H-1Bs while others lost out.

Many staffing firms function more like visa brokers than employers, selling aspiring migrants tickets to the US. That’s one reason they are often derided as “body shops,” said the Report by Bloomberg.

“The USCIS report doesn’t name the companies, but by matching the report’s details to the visa data, Bloomberg News was able to link them all to Reddy. Cloud Big Data, for instance, is identified in the report as “Company B.” (Neither USCIS nor Reddy’s representatives would confirm or deny the connections.) In the 2020 lottery, Reddy’s Cloud Big Data submitted the names of some 288 employees. At the same time, a dozen other companies Reddy controlled—companies with similar-sounding names, similar-looking websites, and overlapping mailing addresses—submitted many of the same workers’ names, USCIS officials determined. In all, his companies entered the lottery more than 3,000 times. The man behind a scheme flagged by Reddy’s companies worked in concert to game the lottery, winning more than 300 H-1Bs since 2020,” said the report by Bloomberg.

To file the investigative report, Bloomberg News obtained data on H-1B lottery registrations, selections, and petitions for fiscal years 2021 through 2024 after bringing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security under the Freedom of Information Act. The full dataset has 1.8 million rows. The analysis was focused on two types of employers: outsourcing companies and IT staffing firms.

To estimate how many H-1Bs were captured by multiple-registration abuse, Bloomberg reporters calculated how many H-1B approvals were associated with candidates whose names were submitted multiple times in the same lottery.

“Kandi Srinivasa Reddy had created his own small company with a grand ambition to become 'the Amazon of staffing.' A self-described 'common farmer’s child' from a cotton-growing region in India, Reddy had earned a master’s degree in the US and worked as a tech consultant, eventually settling near Dallas. In 2013, he started his own outfit called Cloud Big Data Technologies LLC,” said the report.

The report further said that much of Reddy's firm’s strategy involved working the US immigration system. Cloud Big Data would look for tech workers who needed an H-1B to remain in or move to the US, offering recruiters up to $8,000 a head, according to online ads. After winning an H-1B, Reddy’s company would rent the workers on contract to corporations such as Meta Platforms Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc., visa applications show. The company said in its online advertisements that it collected 20 percent or 30 percent of the worker’s pay, an amount that could reach $15,000 or more each year for a typical worker.

Following the release of Bloomberg's report, Srinivas Reddy released a statement claiming that his political rivals, oblivious to his ascent, had been targeting his business operations, which he had been legitimately conducting by securing all necessary approvals from the governments. He also threatened to sue, issuing legal notices to those involved in spreading false propaganda against him. He also said he was filing cases with the cyber police against the social media handles and channels spreading 'fake' news and information internationally against him.