Review how the vacancy affects the applicant’s actual duties and the support for the US role.
Update the working structure
Identify temporary and planned coverage honestly. Do not keep using the departed employee as present support or assume that an unchanged title proves unchanged primary duties.
A future reporting chart does not itself provide work authorization or justify describing planned support as already operational. The backward clock is the qualifying year, which must be continuous and must fall within the three years before the petition, so an employee who has already been working in the United States for an extended period may find the window closing. Start by checking whether the twelve-month employee year is complete; if it finishes in two months, the petition cannot be filed until then, and the retiring manager should be asked to stay on part-time or a US employee should act in the interim. Use the foreign employment record as the anchor, then map corporate approvals, premises, staffing plans, petition preparation, and the employee’s notice period around it. A first review should make a dated corporate-and-employment timeline, identify the entity that employed the person abroad, and separate strategic authority from day-to-day production. For a new office, a revised client plan does not extend the initial one-year approval automatically; subsequent review must use the actual business history.