The Email No Employer Expects
Earlier this year, my office filed a prevailing wage request for a grain handling operation in the northern plains. The position was real, the worker was long-tenured, and the Form ETA-9141 described a year-round job at the facility: maintaining the elevator equipment, collecting and examining grain samples, and training newer workers. Months later, the Department of Labor's National Prevailing Wage Center wrote back. It was not a wage determination. It was an email stating that the agency was "unable to render a decision" on the request and was issuing a Request for Information, an RFI, to address "deficiencies" in the application.
Deficiencies is a strong word for what the agency actually identified, and if you have received one of these letters, the framing probably stung. But an RFI at the prevailing wage stage is neither a denial nor an accusation. It is the analyst telling you that the record, as filed, does not let them classify the position confidently, and giving you one chance, on a short clock, to fix that. What you do with that chance, and what you are not allowed to do with it, is the subject of this article.
This piece is the third leg of a series. The first covers why the prevailing wage determination is the foundation of the entire PERM process and how to build a job description before filing. The second covers the combination-of-duties problem that makes agricultural positions especially prone to classification trouble. This one covers what happens when, despite planning, the government writes back with questions.
What a Prevailing Wage RFI Is, and What It Is Not
The regulation governing prevailing wage determinations, 20 CFR 656.40, says surprisingly little about what happens between filing and determination. It requires the employer to request the determination from the National Prevailing Wage Center in the manner the agency prescribes, and it sets the validity period of the resulting determination at no less than 90 days and no more than one year. The RFI lives in the gap between those two provisions: it is processing practice, not codified procedure. When the analyst reviewing your ETA-9141 cannot match the position to a Standard Occupational Classification code with confidence, or spots an internal inconsistency in the form, the Center issues an RFI rather than guessing.
That last point deserves emphasis, because the alternative to an RFI is worse. The National Prevailing Wage Center is not obligated to ask you what you meant. It could simply classify the position based on its best reading of an ambiguous record, and the wage that results from a misclassification can make a sponsorship economically impossible. An RFI means the analyst is giving you the opportunity to make your own record before the classification decision is made. Treat it that way.
It is also worth distinguishing the RFI from two other mechanisms in the same regulation. After a determination issues, an employer who disagrees with the assigned wage level may submit supplemental information under 656.40(h), and after that, may pursue review under 20 CFR 656.41. Those are post-determination remedies, and in nearly thirty years of practice I have rarely seen them change a result. The RFI is different: it comes before the determination, while the record is still open. It is the last point in the process where your words, rather than the agency's, define the position.
One more piece of context. Requests for information at the wage stage have become noticeably more common since the PERM process moved onto the Department of Labor's FLAG platform, which reviews each filing far more closely than the system it replaced. If it feels like DOL suddenly started interrogating prevailing wage requests that would have sailed through five years ago, that is not your imagination.
The Rules of the RFI: Read Them Before You Draft Anything
The RFI arrives as a letter with numbered issues, and it is tempting to start drafting answers immediately. Do not. The letter also states the procedural rules that govern your response, and three of them shape everything you write.
Your response is additive only
The RFI will tell you, in plain terms, that job duties and requirements present in the original submission cannot be reduced or removed. Your response does not replace what you filed; it is appended to it. If the original job duties field was vague, you cannot swap in a better version. You can only add clarifying text on top of what is already there, and the combined total, original plus response, must fit within the form's character limit for that item. DOL's RFIs state the budget explicitly: for the job duties field, 4,000 characters including spaces, shared between what you filed and what you now add.
This rule has a strategic consequence that is easy to miss. Because nothing can be walked back, a duty you wish you had never listed is permanent. Your response can characterize it, contextualize it, and clarify which of its readings applies, but the words themselves stay on the form. Every sentence of the response should be written with that in mind: you are building on the record, not editing it.
You must grant permission to correct the form
The response must expressly confirm that the National Prevailing Wage Center has permission to correct the ETA-9141 with the information you provide. This is boilerplate, but it is mandatory boilerplate; a response that answers every substantive question and omits the permission statement is incomplete. Put it in, once, covering every issue the RFI raises.
The deadline is real, and it is short
The response window on a prevailing wage RFI is measured in days, in recent practice about a week from issuance. If the Center does not receive your response by the stated deadline, the application is returned unprocessed. Not denied, returned, which sounds gentler and is not. A returned application surrenders your place in a processing queue that currently runs five to eight months. You would file a new request and start the wait from zero. For a PERM case that is already racing a priority date or a worker's status expiration, that is the costliest outcome available, and it happens by default if the deadline passes.
The letter offers two response channels: an RFI Response case action inside the FLAG system, or an email to the Center referencing the case number. Use the case action. The email route exists, but the portal ties your response to the case record directly and avoids the processing delays the agency itself warns about.
The prevailing wage RFI response process.
Trap One: O*NET Boilerplate Reads as "Unclear"
Here is the irony at the center of our grain elevator case. The method that produces a defensible job description, and the method I recommend, is to start from the government's own occupational taxonomy: find the O*NET classification that fits the position, review its task statements with the employer, keep what is true, and cut what is not. Starting from the government's standards is the strongest defense against the accusation that requirements were tailored to the foreign worker.
But there is a failure mode hiding inside that method. O*NET task statements are written at catalog level, generic by design, because each one must describe thousands of jobs at once. "Maintain or repair agricultural facilities, equipment, or tools" is a perfectly accurate description of work performed at a grain elevator in North Dakota, a nursery in Oregon, and a research farm in Georgia. Which is precisely the problem: a duty statement that could describe any of those operations describes none of them. The analyst reading your form cannot see the elevator. If the duties are all catalog language, the analyst has no way to confirm that the SOC code you suggested actually fits, and the RFI writes itself.
In our case, the RFI asked us to specify the facilities, equipment, and tools behind the maintenance duty, the techniques used, model numbers where appropriate, and, pointedly, whether the work included engines. The response was straightforward because the underlying facts were: the equipment was the grain handling infrastructure itself, bucket elevators, chain conveyors, augers, distributors, the dust collection system, a grain dryer. The maintenance was routine and preventive, greasing bearings, replacing belts and buckets, clearing grain dust, performed with basic hand tools. Two model numbers satisfied the model-number request. A vague duty became a verifiable one in a single paragraph.
Every question in the RFI is a classification question
Notice the engine question, because it is the most instructive line in the letter. The analyst did not ask about engines out of mechanical curiosity. Engine repair belongs to different occupations, farm equipment mechanics, general maintenance and repair workers, with different wage data. The question was really asking: is this position what the employer says it is, or is it partly a mechanic's job wearing an agricultural title? If the honest answer had involved engine overhauls, the position would have been drifting toward a combination of occupations, with the wage consequences that follow. The honest answer was that the position performs no engine work, and the response said so expressly, in those words, so the record forecloses the drift.
That is the template for answering any specificity demand: give the facts, all of them, but understand what each fact signals about classification, and where the truthful answer negates a higher-wage occupation, say the negative explicitly rather than leaving it to inference. "The position does not perform engine repair" is worth more on this record than a silence the analyst might fill either way.
Trap Two: The Disjunctive Duty and the Checkbox
The second issue in our RFI was an internal inconsistency, and it is one of the easiest traps to fall into on the ETA-9141. The job duties included a line drawn from the O*NET task list: supervise or train agricultural technicians. Elsewhere on the form, a checkbox asks whether the position supervises the work of other employees. We had checked No. The RFI put the two side by side and demanded the SOC codes of the occupations to be supervised, with the now-familiar reminder that duties cannot be removed.
See the bind the form creates. The duty came from the government's own task list, where it is written in the disjunctive: supervise or train. A worker can train colleagues, show a newer hire how to service the equipment he knows better than anyone, without supervising a single person, without authority to assign, direct, or evaluate anyone's work. The O*NET sentence covers both. The checkbox recognizes only one. Copy the task statement faithfully, answer the checkbox honestly, and you have filed a form that contradicts itself in the government's eyes.
The response threaded it the only way the additive rule allows: not by removing the duty, which is prohibited, but by clarifying which half of the disjunctive describes the job. The worker trains; he does not supervise. He holds no authority over anyone's work. The No checkbox was accurate as filed, and the occupation he trains is the same one he holds. That answer gives the agency the SOC code it demanded while declining the invitation to recharacterize the position as supervisory.
The invitation matters because supervision is not a neutral fact on a prevailing wage request. Supervisory duties can raise the assigned wage level, and conceding that an agricultural worker supervises field labor points toward the first-line supervisor classifications, a different occupation with different wage data. When the truthful answer is training without authority, the difference between "he supervises and trains" and "he trains but does not supervise" is the difference between two classifications, and only one of them is your case.
Respond or Start Over: The Queue Economics
Every RFI letter mentions, almost in passing, that the employer may withdraw the application at any time and file a new one. Occasionally that is the right move: if the RFI reveals that the true facts of the position cannot support the classification you filed under, a clean refile beats an unwinnable defense of the old record. But understand the price. Withdrawal resets a five-to-eight-month clock, and the new filing starts at the back of the line. A responsive answer, by contrast, preserves your place in the queue and, once accepted, produces a determination valid for the standard period, no less than 90 days and up to a year, in which to run PERM recruitment.
In our grain elevator case, the arithmetic was not close. The two issues were answerable with facts the employer could assemble in an afternoon, an equipment list from the preventive maintenance system, a clear statement about engines, an accurate account of who trains whom. Responding cost a few days. Refiling would have cost the better part of a year on a case that, like most farm and ranch sponsorships, was already a multi-year project.
The RFI You Never Receive
The best RFI response is the filing that never draws one, and everything above translates directly into prevention. Start from O*NET, but do not stop there: after the employer confirms which task statements are true, convert each one into the concrete version of itself. Name the equipment. Name the tools. Say what the maintenance actually consists of. If the analyst in Washington can picture the facility from the duties field, the classification question answers itself, and specificity costs you nothing when it describes the job the worker genuinely performs.
Then audit the form against itself before filing. Every disjunctive duty, every "or" inherited from a task list, should be checked against every checkbox it could contradict. If the duty says supervise or train and the supervision box says No, either split the difference in the duty language at filing time, when you still control every word, or be prepared to explain the disjunctive later, on a one-week clock, in a response that cannot delete anything. The first option is better. We use the second when the form is already filed, and it works, but it is a repair, not a plan.
For agricultural employers, this diligence sits on top of the structural issues that make sponsoring a long-term H-2A worker a planning-intensive project in the first place: the year-round-position requirement, the winter duties, the combination-of-duties exposure. The prevailing wage request is where all of it becomes permanent. The RFI, if one comes, is the government offering you one short, rule-bound chance to finish the record properly. Answer with facts, answer on time, and know exactly what each answer signals.
If a prevailing wage RFI has landed on your desk, the clock is already running, and the response rules reward preparation over improvisation. My office has handled prevailing wage requests and RFI responses for agricultural and other employers across Montana, North Dakota, and the Rocky Mountain West for nearly thirty years. Call before you draft, days matter.
Immigration Law of Montana, P.C. — Montana: 406-373-9828
