Eulia, Inc. · The start-date question, and only that
You asked four questions at the end of Saturday and told me to answer those before anything else moves. This page answers those four and stops.
Sunday 30 August 2026 · Cleveland · Every date and every figure is set in this typeface, so a fact you can check always looks different from my reasoning. Three independent advisers were used, none of whom was told what the others or I thought.
Across tax, company filings, cash and state law, later is better and it keeps getting better. Nothing in those four areas ever rewards starting sooner. The only thing that stops the slide is immigration, which sets a floor. The simplest date is the first clean month boundary above that floor, and that is Monday 1 September 2026.
Why a month boundary matters more than it sounds. Your agreed pay is $12,000 a year, which is exactly $1,000 a month and $500 a half-month. Start on the first of a month and every pay packet is that exact figure forever. Start in the middle of one and somebody has to decide how to split a part-month, and there is genuinely no law telling them how. On a 3 August start the two reasonable ways of splitting it differ by $57.26 on a single pay packet. That is the sort of thing that gets settled years later by whoever happens to be typing.
1 September also sits in the same tax quarter as August, so it costs you the same number of federal returns, and it is weeks clear of the New York move, which is the single most expensive thing that could have gone wrong here and did not. Had you started while still a New York employer, the minimum lawful wage would have been $35,360 a year rather than Ohio's $15,080, with two separate $5,000 paperwork penalties New York has and Ohio does not.
The honest qualifier. A simplest date is not the same as the true date. If you actually did work for pay in the second half of August, then the date is when that happened and not when it would have been tidiest. The form that records your hiring is meant to say when employment did begin, never when a resolution says it could have. That is the one line nobody should cross.
Monday 17 August 2026. The first working day after the physical card was in your hands. Two advisers reached that separately, and a third had already reached it on Saturday before any of today's evidence existed.
The reason it is the safest rather than merely the earliest is about proof, not permission. Your employer has to complete a federal hiring form within three working days of your first day, and that form requires somebody to physically look at your card. Pick a date when the card was in the flat and that form is truthful and easy. Pick an earlier one and the form is either late or untrue, and there is no version of this where making a federal form untrue is the cheaper option.
Your renewal was recorded as arriving 16 June. Your previous permit expired 15 June. One day.
Had it been recorded a day earlier, your expired card plus your school's endorsed form would together have been valid proof of permission from 16 June onwards, which is the exact date your compensation memorandum originally named. Everything downstream, the gap, the questions, this page, comes from that single day.
There is separate evidence that you actually submitted it at 20:20 Eastern on Monday 15 June, and that the government's system recorded 16 June because it stamps in a different time zone. Both advisers who looked at that said the same thing: it is real, and you should not take it to the government. Nothing turns on it today, and raising it means opening by pointing an official at the very thing it exists to explain away.
Not 16 June, and you settled that yourself in writing. All three of your directors signed a resolution on 27 July that recites the renewal was received on 16 June, that the condition therefore failed, and that "the Chief Executive Officer's W-2 employment did not commence on June 16, 2026 and no wages have accrued". That is your own executed document ruling the date out. I did not have to argue it.
That same resolution then sets the real date by a formula rather than by naming a day:
the commencement date of the Chief Executive Officer's W-2 employment is re-set to the first date on which both (i) the Chief Executive Officer's Employment Authorization Document ... has been issued and (ii) employment during that period may lawfully begin under it Executed supplemental board consent, 27 July 2026, read directly from the signed document
So the whole question became: what does "has been issued" mean, and when could employment lawfully begin. There turned out to be six candidate dates, and here is what happened to each.
Ruled out by your own signature
The date printed on the front of your card, and the date on your training plan. But the card is dated that way automatically: the government's student system sets it to the day after your old permit ended and school officials are not permitted to change it. It marks the edge of a period. It is not permission to have worked from that day.
The decision, not the document
This is genuinely the day they decided, and I had to correct the file to say so. But their own email that day ends "The Form I-797 Approval Notice will follow in the mail". On 3 August not even the letter existed, let alone the card.
The letter kills its own case
The date printed on your approval letter. That letter says, on its face, "Your EAD card should be produced within one to two weeks" and "You cannot use this approval notice as proof of your employment authorization." The government's own document says the card did not exist yet and that the letter is not a substitute.
The floor, but nothing could happen yet
The day the card was physically made. Nothing can move the answer earlier than this, because a card that does not exist cannot have been issued. But it was in a production facility, not in Cleveland, so no hiring form could be completed against it.
What the formula produces
The first day you are recorded as holding the card. Both advisers landed here by different routes, which is what makes it worth something rather than an echo: one read "issued" as the card reaching you, the other as the card being made and then found that you still could not lawfully start until it was in your hands. Same day, two ways.
What a practitioner would actually put on the form
15 August was a Saturday. Unless you genuinely worked for pay that day, the first working day is the Monday, and your resolution has a clause letting the board simply confirm a date in writing.
How I know, rather than what I think. The rule that decided it separates three different acts joined by the word "and": granting the application, telling you about it, and issuing the document. Government policy then says approval "orders production" of the card, so production comes after approval and the card does not exist at the moment of the decision. And the employer handbook says a student "must obtain an EAD before they are authorized to work", while the government's own student-work page says you may not begin "until after we approve your Form I-765 and you receive your Employment Authorization Document". The regulations alone would have suggested 16 June was fine. It was the operational guidance that settled it.
It is the card, and I have not established when it arrived. That is the honest answer and it is the weakest point in everything above.
What I actually have is the first date you are recorded as saying you had it, which is Saturday 15 August. That is a first-mention date, not a delivery date, and I should not dress it up as one. Here is what has been checked and what it gave.
What is left, and it is the thing you pointed me at. Your letter says the card went by tracked Priority Mail with delivery confirmation, so the postal service holds a record the immigration system is not showing. Made on Friday 7 August and sent that way, plausible delivery is 10 to 12 August. Both advisers independently named this as the single fact that would most change their answer. A delivery record showing 11 August makes the answer 11 August. Nothing can move it before the 7th. I could not reach the postal site because the browser connection to your Chrome has dropped and needs you to sign in again.
The letter is not it, and this is not my reading. It is the letter's own sentence: "You cannot use this approval notice as proof of your employment authorization." In 2020 the government had to create a temporary, time-limited exception letting an approval letter stand in for a card during production delays, and it expired in February 2021. An exception is only ever created for a rule that already exists. The card is the document.
One detail that explains why nobody found a date on the card itself: the card carries no issue date. An adviser looked at your previous physical card to check. It has only "Valid From" and "Card Expires". No hiring form, no employment-verification system and no school record has ever asked for an EAD issue date, which is why there is no settled term for it.
You are scheduled to move $429.50 on Tuesday 1 September for the period 3 to 15 August. That figure assumed a 3 August start. On the date above, no wage accrued in that period and the payment is $0.00.
I asked a tax adviser to price every candidate date rather than just the likely one, so the answer holds whichever date turns out to be right.
| If employment began | You transfer Tuesday |
|---|---|
| 3 August | $429.52 |
| 5 August | $343.62 |
| 7 August | $257.72 |
| 15 August (Saturday) | $0.00 |
| 17 August (Monday) | $0.00 |
Working-day basis. The alternative calendar-day basis moves the 3 August row to $372.26. Nobody has ever chosen between the two conventions, and there is no law prescribing one.
Ohio's wage-payment rule bites on wages actually earned. If none were earned in that period, there is nothing for it to operate on, no deadline is missed and no penalty accrues. The first money that would then be owed is on Tuesday 15 September, for the second half of August.
Two things are genuinely still open here and I am not deciding either: whether you performed paid work on Saturday 15 August, which is the only thing separating $42.97 from $0.00 on that row; and how a part-month is split, which needs writing down once rather than being improvised at the moment somebody types a number.
Three advisers, none told what the others thought. The second was deliberately blocked from reading six files in your own records that contain earlier opinions on this exact question, ran no internal search at all, and confirmed in its report that it saw nothing. It reached the same date by different reasoning, which is corroboration rather than an echo.
One thing I got wrong today and corrected. Saturday's session told you the approval was 5 August rather than 3 August. It read that off one website, found an entry dated the 5th, and concluded no 3 August event existed anywhere. A status website is one surface, not the record. Your own inbox held an email from the adjudicating office on 3 August reading "Date Approved: 08/03/2026", and their refund refusal of 5 August says your case was approved on "day 21" of their clock, which counts to the 3rd and cannot reach the 5th. I have put the 3rd back and left the other twelve files that carry it alone.
What would change the answer. A postal delivery record earlier than 15 August, which moves it earlier but never before 7 August. Nothing else identified by any adviser moves it at all.