USPTO commits to tackling examiner concerns
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has said it will take measures to address any concerns about the behaviour of its examiners.
It comes after allegations that some examiners have lied about their hours and received overtime pay and bonuses for work they didn’t do.
The USPTO’s statement, provided to The Washington Post (WP), follows a meeting on Capitol Hill with a government committee on Friday (September 12).
In that meeting, USPTO and Commerce Department officials were asked by investigators about allegations that some people have gamed the system and are poorly supervised.
The meeting was held with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Todd Elmer, the USPTO’s chief communications officer, told the WP that the office takes very seriously its duty to carefully manage its telework programme, which allows examiners to work from home, and “closely track its measurable work production and time and attendance requirements for all examiners”.
“When serious concerns such as these are raised, we are committed to addressing them and taking any measures necessary to improve the programme’s operations … We know that our telework programme is too valuable—to the agency and to the American innovators it serves—to accept anything less than its optimal performance,” Elmer added.
In addition, the WP reported, the USPTO and Commerce Department officials told the meeting that they will internally review the telework programme and will employ a consulting firm to advise on how managers can improve their monitoring of more than 8,000 patent examiners.
According to Elmer, the USPTO has also implemented “new requirements” for all teleworkers and given managers new tools to identify potential abuse and take appropriate action, although he did not provide further details.
An internal USPTO report, produced last year following complaints about examiners lying about their hours and receiving overtime pay and bonuses for work they didn’t do, revealed a “culture of time and attendance abuse and scant oversight of the patent office’s award-winning telework programme”, the WP reported.
(Update): In a recent note to its members, the president of the Patent Office Professional Association, Robert Budens, said: "To claim that the USPTO has 'thousands' of examiners not doing their work is simply ridiculous on its face."
