[cedsav]

You have to meet or exceed prevailing wages for the area/position. The reason is to make sure you're not underpaying foreign workers at the expense of local US candidates.

We sponsored H1B applicants in the past, and the numbers were reviewed by the lawyer who took care of the application. We also had to post the opening notice internally, with the salary offered. And finally, as others have stated, the number is known by the sponsored employee, so there's really no incentive to inflate that number.

[hungrygs]

Yes, but if you hire software engineers and label them as computer programmers (see my post here), employers completely side step the "meet or exceed prevailing wages" requirement.

In fairness, blue chip US tech companies don't do that.