Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership

We are a small IT company specialising in e-Learning systems and content integration. Many organisations need to get different IT systems to communicate and share data automatically; or they need their e-Learning content to run in different learning systems. We can make those things happen.

We have done a lot of work with a few companies in the US, helping one to cut their content conversion times from a few weeks to a few minutes, which has saved them thousands of dollars.

When working with the US we face some administrative oddities, which, while manageable, require a lot of time to understand the procedures and the processes at play. The biggest issue for us, however, are the existing visa rules. We have customers that would like us to do some ad-hoc short-term consulting in the US. The current visa rules do not allow this without first setting up an office in the US, and then applying for an intra-company transfer visa.

We appreciate that the US government does not want people turning up and working for months on end, but it does seem to me that the scopes of the business visa and the business visa waiver are particularly narrow. Additionally, it seems to us that visas are more easily accessible for multinational companies than for a small specialist software developer in Sheffield like us. We know that visas may not fall under the scope of TTIP, but anything that will emphasise the case for smaller firms will help us to take full advantage of the opportunities that an agreement would provide.