Temporary Outage of Department of Labor’s iCERT system Delaying LCAs and Wage Determinations

On Tuesday, January 1, 2019, the U.S. Department of Labor’s (“DOL”) portal system iCERT received a record number of H-2B applications submitted by an unprecedented volume of simultaneous system users. The volume of submissions resulted in a temporary shutdown of the iCERT portal system for a period of seven (7) calendar days. According to the DOL, within the first five minutes of opening the semi-annual H-2B certification process, the iCERT system had an unprecedented demand for H-2B certifications with more than 97,800 workers requested in pending applications for the 33,000 available visas. With more than thirty-times the user demand on the iCERT system compared to last year on January 1, the iCERT system experienced a system disruption.