House IP Subcommittee Plans PTO Oversight Hearing Sept. 13

Patent and Trademark Office Director Michelle Lee is to testify before the House IP Subcommittee Sept. 13 on PTO operations, the House Judiciary Committee said Tuesday. The hearing will focus primarily on the Department of Commerce inspector general’s report last week that said PTO employees fraudulently billed the office for almost 290,000 hours of work in late 2014 and 2015 they didn’t perform and collected $18.3 million in salary for those hours. The Commerce IG concluded in the report that the full amount of time that PTO employees falsely billed may be double what the office was able to conclusively estimate was fraudulent. Had PTO employees worked all of the hours they claimed, they would have been able to reduce the office’s backlog of patent applications by almost 16,000 cases, the IG said. PTO's application backlog currently stands at more than 549,000 cases. “I am extremely concerned about the recent Inspector General’s report that indicates time and attendance fraud is still a serious problem” at PTO, said House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., in a news release. “The amount of wasted man-hours that could have been spent reducing the patent backlog is astounding, not to mention the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted paying USPTO employees for work they were not doing.” The Commerce IG report “raises serious questions about the integrity of our patent system,” said House IP Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif. “If the PTO can’t even guarantee sufficient oversight of its employees’ timecards, how can we be assured patent examiners aren’t just rubberstamping ideas without oversight as well?” House Judiciary said House IP also will examine PTO’s progress in implementing the 2011 America Invents Act, and other issues on patent law revamp efforts. Goodlatte noted a July GAO study that recommended PTO act to more consistently define patent quality and better communicate its patent quality standards in agency-produced documents (see 1607200080). House IP’s hearing is to begin at 1 p.m. in Rayburn 2237.