EB-5 Source of Funds for Korean Investors
Documenting a Lawful Path of Funds

To approve an EB-5 petition, USCIS must be satisfied that your investment capital was obtained through lawful means and that you can trace the complete path of the funds — from where the money originated, through every account it passed, to the U.S. commercial enterprise. This is a documentation exercise as much as a financial one, and it is where Korean investors most often need experienced help.

What "source of funds" actually means

Under the governing regulation, capital acquired by unlawful means cannot count toward EB-5, and the petitioner carries the burden of showing the money is clean. Two requirements sit at the center of every source-of-funds review:

Lawful source. You must show the funds came from a legitimate origin — employment, a business you own, the sale of an asset, a gift, a loan, or an inheritance. A bank letter or statement confirming the money is in your account is not enough on its own; USCIS has been explicit that such letters, by themselves, do not establish a lawful source.

Complete path of funds. Beyond the origin, you must trace the money's full journey — through every intermediary account — into the investment. Gaps in that chain are the leading cause of a Request for Evidence (RFE).

These standards come from 8 CFR 204.6(e) and 204.6(j)(3) and the USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part G. This article is general information, not legal advice.

The core documents every EB-5 investor provides

Regardless of where your money came from, USCIS expects a baseline record, including:

• Personal tax returns for the past five years (income, and where applicable property or business filings)
• Bank and brokerage statements showing the funds and their movement
• Documentation identifying and tracing each source of the invested capital
• Records for any third party used to move money into the United States on your behalf

Common Korean source-of-funds scenarios

Most Korean EB-5 investors fund their investment from one or more of the sources below. Each has its own documentary trail:

Gifted or loaned funds must themselves trace back to a lawful source — USCIS looks through the gift or loan to the money's true origin.

The Korea-specific piece: moving the money to the U.S.

Korean investors face an extra layer that domestic investors do not: converting Korean won to U.S. dollars and remitting it abroad. Korea's foreign-exchange rules require large overseas remittances to move through a designated foreign-exchange bank with the required declarations, and those bank and remittance records become part of your EB-5 path-of-funds evidence. If you use a money-service business or a third-party exchanger to transfer capital, USCIS requires you to identify that entity, including its business registration. Keeping clean remittance records from the start is far easier than reconstructing them later.

Why source-of-funds RFEs happen

In its own guidance, USCIS points to recurring gaps that trigger a source-of-funds RFE: relying on a bank letter without tracing the money, unexplained large deposits, a break in the chain between the origin and the investment, or documents that are not translated or properly certified. Most of these are avoidable with a record assembled deliberately rather than gathered at the last minute.