IN THIS GUIDE · Resolve company-name discrepancies before relying on a management transfer relationship
Start with the L-1A eligibility and application overview
Create an entity record with effective dates
Identify legal names, registered trade names and any actual name changes, using the underlying documents. Keep a change of name separate from a merger, asset sale or transfer to another employer. Do not edit historical records to make every name match the current brand. Give the list a column for the source of each date — a certificate, a resolution, a registry extract — because a date remembered by a manager and a date carried on an instrument are different kinds of fact, and only one of them survives a request for evidence.
Trace the qualifying relationship
Explain the actual parent, branch, affiliate or subsidiary relationship, including ownership and control where relevant. A shared name is not sufficient evidence. Confirm continuing qualifying business in the United States and abroad through the qualifying organization rather than relying solely on registration records. Ownership percentages matter more than organisation charts here: the relationship must be one of parent, branch, subsidiary or affiliate, and it has to exist both now and during the period being relied on, which is why an undated chart proves very little.
Connect the applicant to the correct entities
Generally establish a continuous year of qualifying full-time foreign employment in the relevant preceding three years. Link the employment records to the real employer and describe the proposed U.S. role, which must primarily involve qualifying managerial or executive duties. Resolving a company name does not by itself establish either the foreign capacity or the U.S. job. Where the applicant's own title changed at the same time as the company's name, separate the two changes in the record, since a reviewer reading a single document may otherwise attribute the newer duties to the earlier period.
Where a name-change file falls apart
Three mechanisms account for most of the trouble. First, a group describes the change in commercial language — a rebrand, a merger, a restructuring — when the underlying legal event was something narrower, such as a continuance, an amalgamation or the incorporation of a new entity that acquired the assets, and the words chosen at the outset then drive the wrong document search. Second, the payroll records name an entity that never employed the applicant, because a related company administered the payroll, so the year abroad appears on paper to have been served with the wrong employer. Third, the qualifying relationship is proved as it stands today, while the year being relied on falls in an earlier period when the ownership was different. Each is repaired the same way: build a dated list of the entities involved, attach the instrument that created or changed each one, and only then ask whether one continuous year of full-time employment abroad within the three years preceding the filing was served with a qualifying organisation. Hypothetical example: a seed-distribution company treats an amalgamation as a simple change of name, and no document in the file records the date the predecessor ceased to exist.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.