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US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners
McGruber writes: A month after Slashdot discussed "Every Day Is Goof-Off-At-Work Day At the US Patent and Trademark Office," the USPTO issued a statement that it is "committed to taking any measures necessary" to stop employees who review patents from lying about their hours and getting overtime pay and bonuses for work they didn't do.
USPTO officials also told congressional investigators that they are seeking an outside consulting firm to advise them on how managers can improve their monitoring of more than 8,000 patent examiners. The Patent Examiners union responded to the original Washington Post report with a statement that includes this line: "If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
In related news, USPTO Commissioner Deborah Cohn has announced plans to resign just months after a watchdog agency revealed that she had pressured staffers to hire the live-in boyfriend of an immediate family member over other, better-qualified applicants. When he finished 75th out of 76 applicants in the final round of screening, Cohn "intervened and created an additional position specifically for the applicant," wrote Inspector General Todd Zinser in a statement on the matter.
USPTO officials also told congressional investigators that they are seeking an outside consulting firm to advise them on how managers can improve their monitoring of more than 8,000 patent examiners. The Patent Examiners union responded to the original Washington Post report with a statement that includes this line: "If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
In related news, USPTO Commissioner Deborah Cohn has announced plans to resign just months after a watchdog agency revealed that she had pressured staffers to hire the live-in boyfriend of an immediate family member over other, better-qualified applicants. When he finished 75th out of 76 applicants in the final round of screening, Cohn "intervened and created an additional position specifically for the applicant," wrote Inspector General Todd Zinser in a statement on the matter.
Little catwalks with one-way mirrors in the sorting facilities. So inspectors can see who is stealing, screwing off, etc.
Have gnu, will travel.
according to her bio. Most likely, her entire professional career after law school.
It seems that one only see tenures like that nowadays in government, or in a family owned business. At least in the case of a business we have the pressures of the market which can topple a business that falls too far behind. A government agency can continue for decades with the same inefficient practices without any kind of market correction, with the same cronyism, the same cushy pensions (instead of 401Ks) and sick days and vacation day rollovers. It's like a sports team that didn't keep track of wins or losses, so at the end of each year the coach would say "we're working damn hard, and getting good results." How would anybody know?
to eliminate patent examiner fraud. The method, of course, is patented.
Good grief. The IG report involved a dozen or so examiners. The actual number is not stated There are over 8,000 examiners at the PTO. Gimme a friggin break.
I happen to be Ms. Cohn's boyfriend from this article (posting AC for obvious reasons). I worked very hard to earn my newly created post. No nepotism of any kind came into play at all. I completely deserve this job, especially considering all the bedroom hours put in. I deserve my 'new attorney advisor' position ( http://www.federaltimes.com/ar... ). I hope I don't get fired over this...
Though it is complicated by the government service issue, there are ways to measure performance...
- Salt the case load with fictitious, bogus applications intended to be declined. In fact, this can both detect work that is disingenuous, and start applying some quality checks. Applications that are so flawed as to be obvious can be expected to fall through as approved if examiners are just phoning it in.
- Break up the review process, no insight into the next step for any examiner. At some point, some examiners will be doing too little work to keep up, or the backlog will inspire some investigation. Perhaps.
- This is an oldie. Full tracking of the examiner's work, down to the keystroke.
- Even older, time to put up the performance chart. Peer pressure will probably not work in Civil Service, but it's a valiant try nonetheless.
Now, the real trick is how to measure performance. That scares me.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
When he finished 75th out of 76 applicants in the final round of screening, Cohn "intervened and created an additional position specifically for the applicant"
It's about time! I can't believe they only now got around to creating a position dedicated to checking for a filing's obviousness.
USPTO officials also told congressional investigators that they are seeking an outside consulting firm to advise them on how managers can improve their monitoring of more than 8,000 patent examiners. The Patent Examiners union responded to the original Washington Post report with a statement that includes this line: "If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
STUPID! This problem was solved years ago: when people commit fraud, you send them to a jail cell! The few overt miscreants suffer, while the rest are given cause to think twice. These officials are doing nothing more than complaining how hard their jobs are and setting up a smokescreen for their incompetence.
And ... I'd really like to know by what standard the patent examiners claim to "be producing the best performance in recent memory". Their memory doesn't seem to be terribly reliable...
When you really want to find misery, look first to the bureaucrats...
Tell them that the leadership has had it with this culture and will start directing the Inspector General to arrest employees who behave in this fashion and charge them with defrauding the federal government. Throw their ass in prison, don't fire them. Contractors get charged with defrauding the federal government and it's no better when a federal employee does it, especially when overtime is involved.
Everyone bitches about fraud, waste and abuse, but the majority of the people who'd unleash the various OIGs and FBI on the civil service are on the right. The moment that, say, a President Rand Paul ordered the OIG to decimate the workforce of the USPTO via prosecutions, you'd have every moderate and left-wing leader howling about how he's "anti-government" and this or that. How the poor civil service is under fire from those evil right wing, corporation-loving conservatives and libertarians.
Look at the VA. The only people who want to bust the VA hard on the right.
I had this problem at a place I used to work... we were an "answer the e-mail" schedule, and we went six weeks without anybody in our department getting any work commands for the system. I had no choice but to tell my boss the reason why I couldn't close any tickets was because I had no tickets. We checked, saw we were at zero usage, got laid off, and claimed half our pay for the next 99 weeks.
I know Deborah Cohn! Her late father, Harry Cohn, was a scumbag at the Richmond law firm of Chaplin, Papa, Gonet. His favorite matters to handle were debt collection, and his modus operandi was to sue someone who had a similar name as on the debt. He would win every case by lying about having served paperwork against the supposed debtor, and of course, they couldn't show up to defend themselves at a hearing they had no knowledge about.
I have had an examiner on a recent patent application who was not knowledgable in the required physical-geometric structures.
She insisted that a straight object was actually a helix! My patent attorney and I explained the difference, but she and her boss ignored the plain geometric truth and refused to budge and threw out my claims.
I'ld rather have a high level of competence and accept some level of goofing off. You do need a break once in awhile to stay sane.
...she had pressured staffers to hire the live-in boyfriend of an immediate family member over other, better-qualified applicants. When he finished 75th out of 76 applicants in the final round of screening, Cohn "intervened and created an additional position specifically for the applicant...
Can someone now say this is any different compared to what happens in those "third-world" countries? Seriously!!
Now I believe the mantra, "It's who you know..."..."not how much you know or anything else..."
"If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
I tried to track down the reasoning behind a patent that has been recently issued covering growing plants by shining lights on them. The light bulb has been around since about 1880, and I expect we have been using them to grow plants since about 1881. You can't get anything out of them about how something has been approved by the system.
"If 'thousands' of USPTO employees were not doing their work, it would be impossible for this agency to be producing the best performance in recent memory and, perhaps, in its entire 224 year history."
No. No it wouldn't. Because you get behavior like this. Where they aren't actually looking at what they're SUPPOSED to be researching. They're, at best, skimming and passing it along, which takes minimal to no effort.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Make them come to work instead of working at home.
is the solution to all of this. We need to hire more minorities and unqualified workers. We should do this because it would be racist and backwards for organizations to only have the best and the brightest working for them. Is it not unfair to those who try and can't achieve simply because they lack the knowledge, wisdom, and IQ to perform certain jobs? Should we not lower the standards and get rid of those who are capable of performing the job so that those who are less capable can have a chance at success? Success should not just be something that is earned; success is something that all Americans have a right to have, regardless of whether or not they earned it. I voted for Barack Obama not because he was qualified to be the President of the USA, but rather because I knew that African-Americans had been suffering under the yoke of the white man for FAR TOO LONG, and they needed a true leader to lead them to the Promised Land. In other words, I voted for Obama because he was black. We all knew at the time that he had nothing else going for him. And that, my friends, is what makes America great. We don't promote or reward people based on merit; we do it because we know that the government will bail us out even if we fail miserably. God bless you all, and good night.
oh wait. did you realize that capitalism died in 2008? executed by a ultra-right-wing conservative, with the help of a banker and a former CEO.
why bother how hard is it to have you best performance , when the policy is fee paid? rubber stamp!
It feels like this is just one indication that the patent system is corrupt. How can you prevent that a patent isn't going through an application process without a flaw?
One way to weed out bad workers is to have a cross-examination of the patents. If there's a great deviation between the review results from the two reviewers (or three if you want to make it even safer) then it's an indication that one of the reviewers may not be doing his/her job. Of course - it's not a single patent that you can detect this on but a number of patents. So sometimes statistics is your friend - but it requires that the ones that review the statistics aren't corrupted.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Is the management at the USPTO so incompetent that they cannot do this themselves? If you are a manager, you know what your people are doing. If you don't, you should be fired. The solutions to this problem are bleedingly obvious, but unpalatable, so they need to spend millions paying someone else to give them the options, that they then won't implement...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I just figured out why the patent system is so screwed up. One word .. union.
Form a union like the USPTO employees did Then management has no means to deal with slackers.
Yeah, blame it all on the examiners--don't pay any attention to the management which requires them to process and pass as many patents as they can in as little time as possible, because that brings in the most money. It's all the fault of those "lazy" employees who basically do what they're told! :p ;)
If you really want to change things, don't measure performance by how many patents are granted! Because there's no surer way of guaranteeing that bad patents will be passed than that!
All patent applications must include a full scale working model.
If it is not a physical object, patent rejected.
If it is biological, patent rejected.
Any patent examiner who approves more than 5% of the applications they work on, is assumed to be aiding and abetting patent frsud.
First offence is a written warning.
Second offence is one month suspension without pay.
Third offence is termination, with no benefits, nor eligibility to work for any federal, state, or local government agency, nor any organization that has a contract with any government agency.
The fee to appeal a denied patent is US$10^10. This fee is not refundable. This fee is not tax-deductable.
The fee to appeal a patent application that has been denied twice is US$10^12. This fee is neither refundable, nor tax-deductable.
Amongst those 8,000 patent clerks there are many that probably take their job seriously, you never know, one could be the next Albert Einstein
"Much of his work at the patent office related to questions about transmission of electric signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization of time, two technical problems that show up conspicuously in the thought experiments that eventually led Einstein to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time."