This week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) invited stakeholders to participate in a session about the Validation Instrument for Business Enterprise (VIBE), a web-based tool to be used in adjudicating employment-based immigrant and nonimmigrant petitions. VIBE is essentially a live database containing information on businesses, that USCIS adjudicators will consult to determine whether the petitioner (employer) in an employment-based petition is legitimate and viable.

The data in VIBE are supplied by Dunn and Bradstreet (D&B) a leading information provider of commercial information and insight on businesses. D&B may be most well known for having created the D-U-N-S Numbers assigned to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. Among the information that D&B may provide to USCIS will be:

• validation of data consistency between branch & headquarter names
• reasonability between number of employees, sales volume and line of business
• validation of out-of-business status changes
• standardized addresses.

Stakeholders expressed concern that USCIS will rely on VIBE as the sole authority for information about the petitioner which will result in more USCIS challenges to petitioners to justify why the information that the petitioners supplied to USCIS with their cases and the information in VIBE do not match.