IN THIS GUIDE · Reconciling payroll entity, actual duties, and the qualifying year for someone moved between affiliates abroad
Start with the L-1B eligibility and application overview
List every entity, in order, with dates
Write a single chronology of each entity the applicant has worked for, been assigned to, or been paid by, with start and end dates and the country of each posting. Include short secondments and periods when two entities were involved at once. This is not yet an argument about eligibility; it is the factual base everything else rests on. Gaps and overlaps found now are far cheaper to explain than ones found during a review. Build the chronology in a spreadsheet with one row per segment and columns for entity, country, start, end, and source document. Rows without a source document become the work list. Overlaps and short secondments belong in it too, since those are exactly the periods that later turn out to matter. Producing this before any narrative is written prevents a story being told that the records cannot support.
Separate the payer, the director, and the place of work
For each segment, record who issued pay and social contributions, who set objectives and approved leave, and where the work was physically performed. Assignment letters, secondment agreements, and employer-of-record arrangements often split these deliberately. The classification concerns qualifying employment with an entity in a qualifying relationship, so a mismatch matters. Describe it accurately rather than choosing whichever entity makes the story simplest to tell. For each row, record three names: who paid, who directed, and who owned the site. Assignment letters and employer-of-record arrangements split these deliberately, and the split is a fact rather than a problem to be smoothed away. Where an internal system records a different entity from the payslip, note both and say which one reflects the actual arrangement, with the document that shows it.
Attach evidence to each segment
Then gather what proves each period: employment contracts and amendments, assignment letters, payslips, tax or social insurance statements, contemporaneous organisation charts, and letters from managers who can confirm duties. Records held by a former affiliate abroad can take weeks to retrieve and may need translation. Start the requests early and keep a list of what has been asked for, received, and refused, with the dates of each. Send retrieval requests in the first week and log each one with the date, the recipient, and what was asked for. Archives held by former affiliates often sit with a payroll provider rather than with a human resources team, and a request routed to the wrong place can go unanswered for a month without anyone noticing. Where a document cannot be produced, obtain a written explanation instead of leaving a silence.
Send the reconciliation to counsel with the questions attached
Which entity counts as the employer abroad, whether the required period of qualifying employment is met, and whether time already spent working in the United States affects the analysis are assessments for licensed United States immigration counsel. An adviser's job is to hand over a clean chronology, the supporting records, and an explicit list of the segments in doubt, so the legal review starts from facts instead of reconstruction. Hypothetical example: a print-finishing group payrolled an employee through a shared services entity in one country while an operating affiliate in another set objectives and approved leave. Which entity counts as the employer abroad, whether the continuous qualifying year within the preceding three years is met, and how any prior authorised United States employment affects the maximum period of stay are legal assessments. Hand counsel the chronology, the records, and an explicit list of the doubtful segments.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.