There is both good and bad news to report concerning PERM processing. The bad news is that the Department of Labor (DOL) prevailing wage system has not improved in the nearly three months that it has been operating. The good news is that PERM processing times are finally starting to drop significantly.

Effective January 1st, the DOL began requiring that all prevailing wage requests (PWR) be filed though the DOL national office in Washington, DC. Previously, employers filed PWRs through their local state offices. The state offices took anywhere from one day to two weeks to process a PWR and issue a prevailing wage determination (PWD).

Unfortunately, the DOL's new system seems to be holding at a uniform 60 days for processing PWRs and issuing PWDs. We had hoped that as the new personnel progressed up the learning curve, this processing interval would drop down to something more reasonable. Unfortunately, it has not done this.

A PWD is a necessary first step in the PERM recruiting process. Unless and until an employer knows what the DOL will determine the prevailing wage to be, the employer cannot begin the recruiting process. Every state job service job order form requires the employer to state the prevailing wage for the job.

Since the DOL is taking a minimum of 60 days to process PWRs, and the state job service order must be left open for 30 days, with another 30 day wait before the PERM can  be filed, this means that there is a built in, irreducible 120 day wait between the filing of the PWR and the filing of the PERM. There are some limited measures employers can take to deal with this problem, but for the most part, companies are going to have to learn to live with it.

 The good news is that the PERM processing intervals that had ballooned out to 14 months or more last year now appear to be getting shorter and shorter. Our firm is now receiving approvals for cases file about six months ago. We have seen a steady reduction in processing times since the last few months of 2009. Hopefully, this trend will continue. Back before everything went haywire a couple of years ago with the consolidation of all files into the Atlanta office, and the bizarre situation of the DOL having no contractors working for them for almost ten months, processing times were averaging three weeks. Let's hope this reduction that we are seeing will get us back to that level soon.