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.

Comments

OY

[Patent Lover]

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.

This is not a new or unique problem

[rickb928]

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.

Re:This is not a new or unique problem

[jonsmirl]

The problem is that the patent office is a papermill and the number of patents being granted has be growing at around 5% a year compounded for the last 25 years. I'm pretty certain that the number of patentable inventions found each year is not growing at 5%. Instead the definition of what is patentable keeps expanding into areas where it doesn't belong. The growth mainly benefits patent lawyers and patent office employees. We've gone from granting 100,000 patents a year 20 years ago to 300,000 a year now.

Do a little projecting out - if that same growth is maintained in 20 years they'll be granting 900,000 patents a year. And we'll have a pool of 12 million active patents to deal with. To support all that you'll need 25,000 or more examiners. Of course patent infringement lawsuits will be totally out of control - no human can be expected to know the contents of 12M patents and not infringe on them. Heck, I can only read three or four before my head explodes.

The simple fix is to limit the patent office to granting a fixed number of patents each month. And I'd set that limit at 10,000 or less per month. Doing that stabilizes the number of employees at the patent office. And do you really believe there are 10,000 inventions made each month worthy of patent protection? I sure don't believe that there are that many. I'd set the limit even lower - 5,000 or less. Setting the limit lower simply gets rid of the junk and makes the ones that do get granted more valuable.

Re:This is not a new or unique problem

[pepty]

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.

- The first would waste 1 or 2 days of patent examiner time per bogus application. On top of that, each bogus application could only be used a handful of times before they were known throughout the section, so the ~$10-50K it would take to hire patent agents to create each bogus application would add up quickly. Copypasta applications would be too easy to spot, as would ones that are quickly thrown together. A 500 page patent application from a pharma is not something you just whiz together overnight. A better bet might be to just assign the same application to two examiners 5% of the time and then compare the first office actions they submit. That would work so long as examiners can't compare their caseloads ...

- Breaking up the review process would mean that many patent examiners would have to familiarize themselves with each patent as opposed to just one. That could easily double or triple the man hours necessary to examine each patent, and significantly delay each office action. Which is why I suggested only duplicating the effort 5% of the time.

- Full tracking of their workload would be a PITA all around. A program that monitors how many hours are actually spent on each portion of the examination, as well as when those hours are spent, would be good enough.

- Performance charts, monitoring, rank and yank, etc: might work in biotech and organic chemistry sections where there is no shortage of qualified applicants, but in IT if you make the working conditions any more unpleasant everyone will just head off to the private sector. If you want examiners willing and able to work like patent attorneys, you'll have to compete on the patent attorney pay scale ($250k per year and up).

Re:Ask the US Postal Service

[PPH]

The USPTO has experienced all three problems, and financial investors in lots of different tech companies have paid dearly.

That's the principle behind government: They play with other people's money, other people's intellectual property, other people's freedoms. So when they f*ck up, other people suffer.

It's called sovereign immunity.

Re:Next = Examiner Competence in their field

[pepty]

How did you phrase the claim? Regardless, it varies a lot from one section to the next based on the job market for the applicants. Biology/Pharma/Biotech/O-chem has had huge layoffs over the last 15 years, so there are plenty of PhDs with years of industrial experience, patent writing experience and perhaps a JD for each examiner position that opens up. Software and engineering, not so much.

step one

[Revek]

Make them come to work instead of working at home.