Cupertino pair charged in dozens of alleged visa frauds

Accusations include possible harm to other staffing firms

A woman and man from Cupertino have each been charged with seven counts of visa fraud in what U.S. prosecutors allege was a scheme involving dozens of foreign technology workers illegally approved for employment under the H-1B visa.

Elangovan Punniakoti, 52, and Mary Christeena, 47, appeared in federal court April 12 in San Jose for an initial hearing. Prosecutors claim that over a decade leading up to May 2020, the pair submitted fraudulent H-1B visa applications for 54 foreign workers sponsored for the visas by an IT staffing company incorporated in Santa Clara County in 2008 where Punniakoti was CEO and Christeena was president, the department said.

The H-1B is intended for skilled workers and is heavily used by Silicon Valley technology firms, which employ many H-1B workers directly and many more through staffing companies. The visa is notoriously hard to obtain, with companies across the country often submitting some 200,000 applications for the annual 85,000 new visas.

Punniakoti and Christeena's allegedly fraudulent visa applications gave their company, Innovate Solutions, “an unfair and illegal advantage over (other) employment-staffing firms,” the department claimed.

The applications said the foreign workers would be placed at specific client companies, but those companies either never received the workers or never intended to receive them, the department alleged. Instead, once the H-1B applications were approved, “Punniakoti and Christeena created a pool of H-1B workers that were placed at employment positions with other employers that had actual work, not with the identified end-clients,” the department claimed.

The two accused fraudsters also were responsible for stating in applications that a foreign worker would be working on an internal project for Innovate Solutions, “despite knowing that no such project existed,” the department claimed.

The companies where foreign workers ended up paid fees of more than $2.5 million to Innovate Solutions to cover workers' wages, plus “a profit markup for Innovate Solutions,” the department alleged.

Punniakoti and Christeena are scheduled to make another court appearance July 25. Both defendants have been released, the department said.

The case follows similar charges made in February against two South Bay executives. Namrata Patnaik, 42, of Saratoga and Kartiki Parekh, 56, of Santa Clara are accused of submitting 85 fraudulent H-1B visa applications in connection with San Jose firm PerfectVIPs. Federal prosecutors allege the scheme gave PerfectVIPs an unfair competitive advantage, and that wages for workers and profit for the company amounted to almost $7 million. Attorneys for the executives said they would fight the charges, calling the government's accusations “a misuse and misapplication of the complex H-1B visa laws.”