To address recruitment documentation fraud for foreign work visas, a platform called PROVE- Professional Registry of Verified Employees- has been set up, which will help connect work visa seekers and work visa sponsoring employers from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia.
The India-based National Organization for Software and Technology Professionals (NOSTOPS), that has advocated for Indian employees in the United States on work visas, has established PROVE.
"With rampant recruitment documentation fraud, cross verification of both, the work visa seeker, as well as the work visa sponsor, is the logical purpose of the registry," said Rajiv Dabhadkar, Founder of NOSTOPS and PROVE.
The platform currently claims to have close to 90,000 users online. Overall, it has as many as 2.3 million work visa seekers, and half a million foreign recruiters from the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, and Australia.
"These users have opted in to receive our feedback and newsletters since 2004, onto www.nostops.org, and since August 2015 via the older version of www.proveit.in," said Dabhadkar.
The agency that oversees lawful immigration into the US- the US Citizenship and Immigration Services- has been talking of tackling immigration-related fraud under President Donald Trump.
"We seek to determine if workers are not being paid while in the United States as they wait for projects or work, a practice known as “benching” which violates U.S. immigration laws. We also conduct site visits in cases where there are suspicions of fraud or abuse and refer many of the cases to our counterparts at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for further investigation," USCIS said in a statement last month.
PROVE claims to use a professional networking framework, which processes user profiles to match location, industry, and skills of the user, to generate real-time employment recommendations.
PROVE is different from National Association of Software and Services Companies Skill Registry as it is open and free to use for employees. The Nasscom Skill Registry is a closed database that is maintained by India's software services industry body of verified Indian workers in the IT sector.
PROVE is monetising primarily through corporate partnerships.
"It is an open registry to measure the identity and reputation of knowledge workers where we verify, qualify, assess, and promote an individual knowledge worker to recruiters overseas...Furthermore, our corporate partners infuse the much-needed partnerships that seek value in being a part of the ecosystem," said Dabhadkar.
Through a team of practicing lawyers, PROVE also supports pre-hiring and post-hiring activities, immigration processes, job offer verification - verification of employment contracts from foreign employers, and professional preparation of documentation.
As the demand for foreign workers will increase further, the process of supplying this demand in the shortest possible time will, therefore, be critical for companies dependent on Indian labour, he said.
