USCIS has announced that it received approximately 172,500 H-1B petitions during the filing period, including petitions filed for the advanced degree exemption.  On April 10, 2014, USCIS completed its computer-generated random selection process, or lottery, to select enough petitions to meet the 65,000 general-category cap and 20,000 cap under the advanced degree exemption.  For cap-subject petitions not randomly selected, USCIS will reject and return the petition with filing fees, unless it is found to be a duplicate filing.  See USCIS’ Announcement here.

USCIS will begin the process of issuing receipt notices for those petitions accepted for processing and returning the complete filings of those petitions rejected/not selected.  Until the receipt notice or rejection package received by the attorney or petitioning employer, it is not possible to know whether any particular application has, in fact, been accepted for processing.  Given the volume of cases USCIS has to process, it is reasonable to expect that it will take at least several weeks to be fully completed/all packages or receipts to arrive at their destinations.