Petitioner does not equal Signatory
Anyone preparing Form I-140 needs to know this subtle thing.
If you go to the trouble of having a Substack newsletter, I guess one positive is that it can be Festivus every day - you can air your grievances whenever you want. This post is akin to the airing of a grievance of mine, a pet peeve.
The issue is simple:
On Form I-140, in Part 1, regarding questions 1 and 2 -
If you are an individual petitioner, you are supposed to list your name; but
If you are an organization (corporate) petitioner, you are supposed to list the company name.
The signatory for an organization is NOT listed in questions 1a and 1b of Part 1 of Form I-140.
Example: If you are representing Vandelay Industries and the signatory is George Costanza, then you list “Vandelay Industries” as the answer to question 2 for Part 1, but you do NOT list “George Costanza”. You would only list George if he were self-petitioning.
If you do list the signatory in questions 1a and 1b, then the I-140 receipt and particularly the I-140 approval notice will list the signatory’s name.
So if Vandelay Industries is filing a PERM-based I-140 for Babu Bhatt, if you list George Costanza as the answers to questions 1a and 1b, then you will get an I-140 approval indicating that George is the petitioner; but he is not the petitioner, he is the signatory.
Bottom line: Read the forms very carefully because small things matter in immigration law!