Congress Offers No Worker Relief
No action expected on H-1B, tax credits until next year
Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld, October 25, 1999

Congress won't be offering help, at least in the short term, to companies in need of high-tech workers or tax credits for training people in high-tech jobs. Legislators aren't expected to take any action on proposals to raise the H-1B visa cap until sometime next year and may not act before this fiscal year's cap is reached.

Moreover, a coalition of trade associations seeking congressional support for job training credits was told last week by a White House official that the tax credit plan had problems and wouldn't be considered until next year.

At a Senate hearing last week on the H-1B visa issue, Susan Williams DeFife, CEO of WomenConnect.com Corp., a Fairfax, Va.-based news and career information service, testified about the information technology labor crunch. She said for an emerging company, "one unfilled tech position can severely impact our ability to grow." DeFife said she spent months trying to fill one system administrator opening until she found a young woman from Mexico who was completing course work in the U.S.

Hiring her meant going through the H-1B visa process, and the company had to wait another four months before such visas were available.

The current 115,000 cap on H-1B visas could be reached early next year -- and perhaps sooner if the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) issued too many visas in the fiscal year ended Oct. 1. The INS is now auditing its work.

High-tech industry trade groups have been pushing for an increase in the H-1B cap and for job training tax credits.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) earlier this year introduced bills that would provide tax credits of up to $6,000 per year for job training.

Moran, speaking at a forum on the tax credit last week, said incentives are needed because while it's in the country's interest to provide training, it's not necessarily in a company's interest to pay for it. A company can invest in training an employee only to lose that person "to another company that isn't willing to make that investment," he said.

But Tom Kalil, a senior director at the president's National Economic Council, said the chances of quick approval of the tax credits are slim. He said administration officials are concerned that the credit rewards companies for training they are already doing.

The "best opportunity" to move forward on this legislation will be for the industry to make "a stronger case" to have it included in next year's budget, Kalil said.