IN THIS GUIDE · Explain how the organization will continue operating outside the United States
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Identify the activity that will continue abroad
Hypothetical example: the applicant would move to lead the U.S. operation while the foreign business is being reduced. Describe the actual goods or services, people and arrangements that will remain. Do not treat maintaining a registration or office address as evidence of all required business activity. Hypothetical example: an organisation that monitors clinical trials under contract proposes to move its founder to run a new United States operation while the Canadian arm keeps two long-running study contracts and the staff who service them. The useful evidence is those two contracts, their end dates, the named monitors assigned to them and the invoices issued under them. Naming a sector establishes nothing; naming the contracts, the people and the money establishes something a reader can check.
Explain who performs and directs the remaining work
Identify the actual responsibilities abroad and the applicant’s retained duties, if any. Describe the proposed U.S. managerial or executive work and its support separately. The plan should not assign the same unperformed operational tasks to both offices without explaining who does them. Write the two operations as two columns rather than one narrative. For each, list who holds the customer relationship, who performs the work, who signs it off, and who is authorized to commit the entity. Where the same person appears in both columns for the same task, explain how working time divides and who covers the gap. A plan in which the applicant remains the only person capable of delivering the foreign work tends to describe an absence rather than a continuing operation.
Document the qualifying organization and employment
Provide the actual legal entities, ownership or control evidence and relevant foreign-employment history. Have the continuous-year requirement and relevant period assessed individually. Continuing business, a qualifying relationship and the applicant’s role are connected but distinct requirements. Assemble the corporate records as a chain rather than a pile: constituting documents, the share register or the instrument establishing ownership or control, and any intermediate holding entity between the two operations. Then set the applicant's employment history against a calendar. The requirement is one continuous year of qualifying employment abroad within the three years preceding the application, so gaps, leaves and periods spent inside the United States each need dates rather than approximations.
Review reductions before relying on the transfer plan
Explain proposed closures, sales or staffing changes and their effect on ongoing business and the applicant’s duties. A new U.S. office also needs the relevant first-year support analysis. Have material changes assessed before treating an earlier plan as still applicable. Ask for the decision record behind each planned reduction: the board minute, the notice to a landlord, the termination letters, the date each takes effect. A reduction that has been discussed is a different fact from one that has been executed, and the file should say which it is. Where the United States operation is new, initial new-office approval is limited to one year and the extension stage examines the operation that actually developed, so a first-year plan the company does not intend to follow creates a problem twelve months later rather than solving one now.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.