What Form I-864 asks of a sponsor, and where India fits in
Form I-864 is a binding promise. As a sponsor, you tell USCIS that the relative you are bringing over will not become a public charge, and you back that promise with evidence that your income — and, if income alone is short, your assets — clears the threshold USCIS sets for your household size. That threshold is tied to the Federal Poverty Guidelines and scales with how many people you are responsible for; your immigration attorney works out the exact figure for your case.
The part a chartered accountant handles is the Indian side. If some of the income you are relying on is earned in India, or if you are leaning on Indian assets — a property, fixed deposits, a mutual fund portfolio — USCIS expects that money to be evidenced properly. A bank screenshot or a self-typed summary carries little weight. A CA certificate that ties to your filed Indian tax return, and an asset statement that values your Indian holdings as on a date, give the reviewer something verifiable.
The CA does not opine on whether you meet the USCIS threshold — that is a US-law question. The CA's job is narrower and more useful: to certify, accurately and on letterhead, what your Indian income and Indian net worth actually are, so that figure can be plugged into the affidavit with confidence.
Income certificate or asset statement — and when you need both
I-864 evidence falls into two buckets, and the Indian-side deliverable mirrors them.
Income is the first thing USCIS looks at — a steady flow that shows you can support the immigrant year on year. Where that income is Indian, the CA's income certificate draws directly on your filed return so the figure is traceable. Assets come into play when income alone does not clear the bar; a sponsor can supplement with assets, and Indian assets are valued in a net-worth statement as on a recent date.
| Indian-side deliverable | What it proves | What the CA relies on |
|---|---|---|
| Income certificate | Annual Indian income | Filed ITR, Form 16 / Form 16A |
| Net-worth / asset statement | Value of Indian assets on a date | Bank, FD, MF / demat, property papers |
| Both | Income plus supplementary assets | All of the above |
The income certificate cross-references your income tax acknowledgement (ITR-V) and the TDS certificates behind it — Form 16 for salary, Form 16A for interest or professional receipts. Because those figures already sit with the Indian tax department, they are hard to dispute. If your attorney says income is comfortably above the threshold, you may only need the income certificate; if assets are doing some of the work, the asset statement matters too.
A worked example: an NRI in the US sponsoring a parent
Anita is a US permanent resident in New Jersey, sponsoring her widowed mother in Hyderabad for a green card. Anita's US salary is the backbone of the affidavit, but she also draws rental income from a flat in Hyderabad and holds Indian fixed deposits, and her attorney wants the Indian income shown cleanly so the household figure is beyond question.
A chartered accountant prepares an income certificate covering Anita's Indian rental income, drawing on her filed Indian return and the TDS reflected against it, and issues a net-worth statement valuing the Hyderabad flat and her fixed deposits as on a recent date. Both come out on the CA's letterhead with a UDIN, so the consular officer reviewing the I-864 package can verify them on ICAI's portal rather than taking them on trust.
What the CA does not do is fill in the I-864 or assert that Anita meets the USCIS threshold — her immigration attorney owns the form and the poverty-guideline arithmetic. The CA's contribution is to make the Indian financials precise and verifiable, so the Indian piece of the evidence is the part nobody has to argue about. How recent the valuations should be, and which years of income to show, are set around what Anita's case actually calls for.
Why a UDIN matters to a USCIS reviewer
A consular officer in Mumbai or a USCIS adjudicator reviewing an Indian sponsor's evidence faces a practical problem: they cannot easily tell a genuine Indian financial document from one a sponsor typed themselves. The UDIN solves that.
UDIN stands for Unique Document Identification Number. ICAI requires its members to generate one for attest and certification work, and anyone can verify it independently at udin.icai.org. When a certificate carries a UDIN, the reviewer can confirm in seconds that it was issued by a real practising chartered accountant and was not altered after signing.
That is the difference between Indian evidence that gets waved through and Indian evidence that draws a request for more documents. A CA-certified income certificate and asset statement, each carrying a UDIN and each tied to records the Indian tax department already holds, give the reviewer a clean, checkable basis for the Indian numbers in your affidavit.