A challenge that practitioners and employers can encounter in preparing an LCA (Labor Condition Application – ETA 9035) for the FY 17 April 1st H-1B Visa Quota Filing is understanding how to correctly enter the dates of employment.
The iCert system only allows you to enter a start date 180 days from the date you are preparing the LCA, making it impossible to enter 10/1/16 as the start date.
The solution is to enter the start date as 180 days from today (the day you are preparing the LCA). So if today is 2/14/2016, you would enter 8/12/2016 as the start date and 8/11/2019 as the end date.
You can use an online calculator, such as http://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/time/date-calendar.php, to make the date calculation.
Since the maximum allowable requested time is 3 years, the end date would be entered as 8/11/2019.
(Entering 8/12/2016 to 8/12/2019 is considered 3 years and 1 day).
Then when preparing the I-129, you enter 10/01/2016 as the start date, and the end date matches the end date of the LCA (8/11/2019 in the example above).