Patent examiners played hooky for hundreds of thousands of hours over a fifteen month period, according to a Commerce Department inspector general report released on Wednesday.
The investigation found that about 8,400 examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office billed the agency for 288,479 “unsupported hours” between Aug. 2014 and Nov. 2015.
“This effort involved comparing the hours that patent examiners claimed to work…on the one hand, with multiple datasets that provided evidence of actual work, on the other,” the inspector general noted.
The watchdog also said that the overall amount of “attendance abuse” could be twice as high, remarking that it “adopted a conservative approach.”
Had examiners worked the 288,479 hours that they said they did, the patent backlog would have been reduced “by approximately 15,990 cases,” the IG concluded.
In July, a report published by the Government Accountability found that the USPTO was sitting on 500,000 cases. The inquiry found that the bottleneck was being fueled by “patent trolls,” and weak guidelines on what constitutes a “quality patent.”
The report additionally discovered that USPTO managers were encouraging examiners to prioritize quantity over quality.
“USPTO provides examiners with monetary incentives, or bonuses, for timeliness and production, but does not offer a bonus for producing high-quality work,” GAO said.
A survey of examiners taken by GAO found that 70 percent “have less time than needed to complete a thorough examination,”
In its Wednesday report, the Commerce Department inspector general said the unsupported hours were worth about $18.3 million in labor costs.
Patrick Ross, a spokesperson for the department, told The Washington Post that the report is a “resource in our ongoing efforts to improve.” He also said that the lost hours represented “just 2 percent of the total hours claimed by patent examiners.”
