The EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act of 2022 bolted six concrete protections onto your $800,000. USCIS must audit every regional centre at least once in five years. Centres file an annual financial statement on Form I-956G, everyone who controls a centre is screened for criminal and securities history, promoters must register with the government and disclose what they are paid, and each fund needs either an independent administrator or annual audited accounts. A rescue provision lets a good faith investor keep a priority date when a project collapses through no fault of theirs. Every one of those measures closed a hole that had already cost earlier investors real money. None of them guarantees you a return.
Why 2022 had to happen
Before the reform, almost anyone could set up a regional centre and raise money abroad. Background checks on principals were not required. Nobody had to tell an investor that the friendly agent in Shanghai or Dubai was taking a commission out of the same $500,000 the investor believed was going into a hotel.
Securities regulators cleaned up afterwards rather than before. The SEC has brought a long run of EB-5 fraud actions, some over projects that raised hundreds of millions of dollars and never seriously broke ground, and the Justice Department has pursued the worst of them criminally through the DOJ Fraud Section. Investors in those deals lost the money and the immigration benefit together. Our page on SEC Crackdowns in EB-5 2026: How Regulators Hunt Fraudulent Deals covers how those cases typically unravel.
Congress responded with a compliance regime rather than a guarantee fund. Read Public Law 117-103, the statute containing the reform act, if you want the original language behind everything that follows.
Audits every five years, paid for by you
USCIS must now audit each regional centre at least once every five years. Auditors review the flow of capital and the job creation evidence, then test both against what the centre has been telling investors. Site visits are permitted at the project itself, which is harder to stage than a spreadsheet.
Someone pays for all this, and it is you. Each investor filing a regional centre petition contributes $1,000 to the EB-5 Integrity Fund. Each regional centre pays annually into the same fund, $20,000 as standard and $10,000 if it had 20 or fewer investors in the preceding fiscal year. Overseas fraud investigations come out of the same account.
Annual reporting is the routine part. Every centre files Form I-956G, the regional centre annual statement, covering capital raised, capital deployed, jobs created and any litigation. Sanctions for filing late or filing falsely run from fines up to termination of the centre's designation. Ask a sponsor for their most recent I-956G before you commit, and read Regional Center Audits 2026: Surviving Tough Post RIA Checks for what auditors actually look at.
Who is now barred from running a regional centre?
Anyone with the wrong history. Every person in a position of substantive authority over a centre must certify on Form I-956H, the bona fides certification for people involved with a regional centre, that they have not been convicted of specified crimes and are not subject to securities related injunctions.
Foreign government ownership is banned outright. No foreign state may own or control a regional centre or the enterprises beneath it, a live worry before 2022 and a flat prohibition since.
Certification is not the same as vetting. USCIS checks what it can, but a signed form does not tell you whether a principal has been sued by their previous investors. Search the sponsor's name in federal court records yourself. It costs an afternoon.
Promoters must register, and disclose what they earn
Migration agents and marketing companies now have to register with USCIS on Form I-956K, the registration for direct and third party promoters. Registration carries a certification of compliance with US securities laws and with the securities laws of the country where the promoter operates.
Disclosure is the part that helps you directly. Fees and compensation paid to any promoter in connection with your investment have to be disclosed, and regional centres are responsible for supervising the promoters who sell their deals. So the question is simple and you are entitled to an answer in writing: how much is this agency being paid for putting me into this project, and by whom?
An agent taking a commission from the sponsor is not neutral about which project you pick. Nobody should call that a scandal. Commission selling is an ordinary sales structure, and the disclosure rule exists precisely because it distorts advice.
How much does EB-5 actually cost?
Start with the investment: $800,000 in a Targeted Employment Area, $1,050,000 outside one, with the first inflation adjustment due on 1 January 2027. That capital is at risk by law, so treat it as money you could lose rather than a deposit.
On top sit the fees that nobody advertises on a billboard.
Sponsors charge a one-off administrative fee to the new commercial enterprise, commonly quoted somewhere between $50,000 and $70,000, and it is usually not refundable if your petition is denied. Immigration counsel for the investor side is typically a flat fee running from the mid teens into the low thirties of thousands of dollars for the whole journey from I-526E to I-829, and complex source of funds work costs more. Government charges include the $1,000 integrity fund contribution plus the petition, adjustment or consular fees listed on the USCIS filing fee schedule. Translation, document legalisation, medical examinations and accountant letters add several thousand more.
Ask for a written schedule showing every fee, who receives it, and whether it is refundable at each stage. A sponsor who will not put that in writing has told you something useful.
Good faith investors and the 180 day rescue clause
Here is the protection people underrate. If a regional centre loses its designation, or if fraud or material misrepresentation is found at the enterprise level, an investor who acted in good faith gets a window of roughly 180 days to take remedial action rather than losing the petition automatically. Moving the investment into a qualifying project while keeping the original priority date is possible under that framework.
Limits apply, and they are real. Rescue provisions cover fraud and administrative failure at the sponsor level. Ordinary commercial failure, a hotel that simply does not make money, is a different problem, and EB-5 Project Failure 2026: Bankruptcy, I-829 Risk, and What Investors Can Still Save works through that scenario.
If you ever suspect fraud in your own deal, report it through the USCIS channel for reporting immigration fraud and abuse and speak to securities counsel the same week. Waiting protects nobody.
Check these five things before you sign
- The centre's most recent Form I-956G annual statement, plus confirmation that it has never been terminated or suspended.
- The Form I-956F receipt or approval notice for the specific project, not for a different deal by the same sponsor.
- Written disclosure of every fee and commission, including what your agent receives.
- The capital stack: how much senior debt ranks ahead of the EB-5 money, and how much equity the developer has actually put in.
- The job cushion: modelled jobs divided by investor units, where anything close to 10 leaves no margin for error.
Compliance culture across the industry has improved since 2022. Fraud has become considerably harder to commit, though nowhere close to impossible, and the phrase "RIA compliant" now describes a legal minimum every sponsor must meet. Background on the wider framework sits in EB-5 Reform and Integrity Act 2022: The New Rules Every 2026 Investor Must Know.