What is an errata sheet?
Hi, I'm Jim Hacking, immigration lawyer, practicing law throughout the United States at our office here in St. Louis, Missouri.
We recently made a video about the amazing red pen and how immigration officers use that to make corrections. But I wanted to talk to you about another trick that you can use. And it's not a trick, it's just an approach to solving an error on your application.
So let's say that you are applying for citizenship, and let's say that you read through the application and you notice that you made two mistakes. One mistake is that you didn't list one of the names that you've gone by. So let's say you have a nickname. Like for me, my name is James, but people sometimes call me Jimmy.
Now, most people don't call me Jimmy. My mother and father and my sisters call me Jimmy, and certain friends who've known me for a long time call me Jimmy.
Everybody else calls me James or Jim. But if I didn't put Jimmy down on my N-400, that would be something that I want to correct before I want to go to the interview. And let's say the other mistake I made was that I thought I had made three trips to Ireland, back to my home country, when in fact I had made four.
So in those scenarios, you're going to want to create an errata sheet. And so what you do is you open up a Word document or a Google Doc, and you type at the top, errata sheet. And you underline it. And then you write down the question that you got incorrect. And then in bold, you write the correct answer.
So for me, I would ask the question about have you ever gone by any other name? If so, what are they? And then I would say Jimmy Hacking. And then when it asks for travel, I would talk about the missing trip, or I'd probably list all the trips over again. So these are the three I listed before.
And here's the fourth one. And then, when the interview starts, I would say, "Officer, I found two mistakes on my application. Here they are. It's already two-hole punched. You can put it right into your file."
The officers like that. They don't necessarily like you to do a whole new N-400 or to even submit those pages. They want to have the record of what the old corrections are.
They might just take your errata sheet and whip out, like I said, their favorite red pen and just make the corrections themselves. Or, more likely, they're just going to insert that into the file and then they'll have those corrections.
So it's all about making sure that we can prove later on that you were accurate and honest in your answers so that someone can't come back later and say, "Hey, you never told us you went by Jimmy Hacking." Or, "Hey, you never told us about that trip you made to Ireland back in March."
So you want to be as thorough as possible. You want to be as correct as possible. You don't want to make any mistakes. But if you did make a mistake, you're going to want to include that errata sheet with your interview packet, with what you bring to the interview.
Now, if you've made a serious number of problems or mistakes with your application, you're probably going to want to talk to a lawyer about how to handle that.
Because then that can get into an area where they start wondering whether you're truthful, whether you're credible, whether the application that you filed is valid. And you're probably going to need some help defending yourself against the claim that you were trying to mislead them.
So that's where you don't want to end up.
So if you have questions about mistakes that you've made, or that you want to correct in your application, or that you want to fix before your interview, give us a call. (314) 961-8200.
You can email us at [email protected]. Be sure to join us in our Facebook group, which is called Immigrant Home. And if you like this video, please share it out on social so that we can update you and all your friends whenever we make a new video just like this one. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
