U.S. Patent Quality: Examiner Fraud

Nanjing Huaxun pointed out that the main problem of the US Patent and Trademark Office is not money, but management. A large number of U.S. patent examiners frequently cheat through remote work-from-home projects, resulting in an overall decline in the quality of U.S. patent examination, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office continues to condone cover-up.

In 2005, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (hereinafter referred to as the Patent Office) began a telework project. This project is a benchmark project of the Obama administration. The Obama administration hopes to implement this innovative system in various departments of the government after success, attract all kinds of American talents to join the government, and improve the political vitality of the United States.

After the U.S. Patent Office's remote work system was launched, the flattery media was full of praise, such as "the Patent and Trademark Office is a role model for remote work", "the Patent and Trademark Office shows the perfect picture of remote work" and so on. This also makes the patent office the most envied by U.S. federal employees. However, the internal investigation of the bureau shows that there are many problems. There are a large number of people who do not work to get wages and bonuses. Managers at all levels lack supervision tools. Even some senior officials condone the examiners to cheat in the declaration of working hours!

The internal investigation of the Patent Office began in 2012. Four prosecutors reported to the higher department of the Patent Office, the U.S. Department of Commerce, that patent examiners abused the new system seriously. The attorney general of the Ministry of Commerce forwarded the report to the Patent Office, which appointed an internal investigation team, including four human resources officers, two deputy general consultants, and an accountant. At the heart of the internal investigation is the telework program, known as working from home, which has been praised both inside and outside the government. The survey results came out in 2013, and the survey results were shocking. A total of 8300 or so employees constantly misrepresent their working hours, half of which are remote workers. Many ended up receiving bonuses for work they didn't do. Inspectors (the patent examiners of the U.S. Patent Office are divided into 557 technical teams, each with one inspector. Above the technical team are the technical centers, with a supervisor in each of the nine technical centers, and a supervisor in total of 26 supervisors. These supervisors report to five assistant deputy directors, who report back to the deputy directors, and the deputy directors report back to the director) that they have noticed this situation. When they took evidence of fraud and asked for access to employees' computer records, they were flatly rejected by senior officials. The result was nothing, and few liars were punished.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had 11627 employees at the time of the internal investigation, 7902 of whom were patent examiners. These examiners are experts in technical fields, usually with master's and doctoral degrees, and they are among the highest paid federal employees, with a maximum of $148000 a year. According to the survey, about 3800 patent examiners work from home all the time and 2700 patent examiners work part of the time.

Investigators found that the patent office's employee management system was very loose. Employees working from home, some as far away as California, did not have to log on to the unit's computer network, did not have to tell their inspectors their working hours, and did not even have to reply to calls from their leaders on the same day. Their leaders also don't know when they are at their desks. The patent office has no means of control over them. The management team of the patent office is quite fragile, and when it comes to key issues, Wang Gu will talk about him. Examiners do not have fixed working hours throughout the year, do not have to be on duty, and there are no penalties for violations.

What makes public opinion even more dissatisfied is that when the Patent Office handed over the internal investigation report to the US Department of Commerce regulatory agency in the summer of 2013, the sensitive part of the report disappeared. The abridged report concluded vaguely, saying that the examining ombudsman under investigation had inconsistent opinions on whether patent examiners had abused the rules. "It is not known whether the accusation of systematic abuse by the whistleblower is true," concluded the report sent to the general prosecutor of the Department of Commerce." Finally, a patent office official provided the full original report to the Attorney General of the Department of Commerce. The original report is 32 pages, and the excerpt is only 16 pages!

The original report raises fundamental questions about the patent office's business model and describes a culture of deception that has been ignored by the office's senior leadership. This culture has led to lax enforcement by patent office managers and the loss of front-line inspectors. Nanjing Huaxun believes that the spokesperson of the Patent Office said that the abridged version is the final, accurate and complete report that has been carefully considered by the leaders. Todd Elmer, chief public affairs officer of the Patent Office, told the media that the original report was a draft for discussion and an initial tentative description of the investigation results. After review by lawyers in the General Counsel's General Advisory Office, many conclusions of the original report were one-sided and were not supported by facts and investigation records. Elmer said the abridged report more accurately and completely reflects the findings.

The survey report mentions some typical cases. One examiner missed 304 hours a year, but received his full salary. Despite repeated warnings, the examiner continued to lie, was caught twice and was not expelled from the patent office. Another examiner declared that she had worked 266 hours, but there was no evidence that she was actually on duty. It doesn't matter, she took the $12533 payment. She was never accused of misrepresenting her hours because an assistant vice president refused her inspector's request for access to all computer records, but insisted that she should be punished with a lighter penalty for repeatedly failing to respond to the inspector's contact request; nor was she required to return the money. Investigators found that monitors on the front lines were powerless against censors who behaved badly. Even if they found that the work schedule was inaccurate, the senior management insisted that they would not agree to further review and would not allow the ombudsman to make records. An inspector said he found the examiner using the mouse to move the plug-in program. He found it, took a picture, reported it to the top supervisor, but to no avail. These parts of the investigation report have been abridged.

It was reported that examiners worked only towards the end of each quarter. They will complete 500 to 1000 percent of their workload in the last two weeks of each quarter, thus jumping from unqualified work to acceptable reward standards. An internal investigation found this to be a widespread phenomenon. Of the 80 vetting ombudsmen surveyed, 70 per cent said that a large number of censors did not work long hours, driving out their workload in the last few days of each quarter. This has a great impact on the quality of patent examination. The examination inspector said that many patent examiners have low work quality standards and meet the minimum standards, so as to get rid of as much examination workload as possible.

In addition, the patent examiner of the U.S. Patent Office can also "mortgage work", that is, the work that has not been completed after the crazy overtime work in the last two weeks of the quarter is currently written into the statement, and it will take another two weeks to really complete the examination work and submit effective work results. The abridged report explains that this is because these censors who are suspected of rushing to work spend a lot of time searching and reviewing, and they want their work to be more precise before submitting it!

The internal review report concluded that USPTO management was unwilling to take action, even when misconduct was rampant and evidence was overwhelming. The investigators recommend that a thorough investigation should be conducted when there are objections to working hours records. The report to the desk of the Attorney General of the Department of Commerce stated that the managers did not have access to the computer records confirming the fraud because they did not want to be seen as the "big brother" of electronic surveillance (the despotic, villain in Orwell's novel "1984").

As circumstantial evidence, in July 2014, an investigation by the Ministry of Commerce showed that dozens of legal assistants on the Patent Office's Appeal Board worked from home, but they received full wages for four years, washing clothes and reading online at home every day. According to the investigation, the reason for this is that the patent office position is frozen and no new magistrate is hired to deal with the backlog of complaints, so these legal assistants are assigned very little work waiting for the new magistrate to arrive.

On August 10, 2014, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Patent and Patent Office filtered out the worst cases of remote work abuse in a report to its own regulatory agency, the Bureau of Commerce. This report has aroused great concern of public opinion.

A day after the Washington Post report, executives at the Patent and Trademark Office are still fighting back. On August 11, 2014, Michelle Lee, deputy director of the Patent and Trademark Office (the current director), who presided over the work, issued a morale-boosting email internally. The audio file attached to the email was 90 seconds long: "I hope you all know how proud I am of your daily work. All your efforts are critical to creating new jobs and business development." Lee said the Washington Post news report put the Patent and Trademark Office in the spotlight, and she reiterated her support for the remote work program because it makes the patent office a sought-after job. "Like every great project or organization, there is always room for improvement. I want to assure you that we all continue to work hard and stick to the right balance of incentives and tools to help our most advanced remote work projects become the gold standard."

A week later, the U.S. Department of Commerce issued a scathing email to 47000 employees around the world, warning that incorrect time records are illegal and reminding them to keep accurate work records: "Employees, inspectors and timekeepers are responsible for ensuring accurate, complete and timely reporting of working hours in each work cycle, including accurate records of telecommuting working hours and non-working hours during working hours. Your work and attendance records are office documents and must be kept accurately.

Nanjing Huaxun US patent experts pointed out that the US Patent Office plays an important role in commercial and economic development, but the examiners and other officials of the aircraft formation team have not completed the trust. This is believed to have led to a backlog of 600000 patent applications in the United States, which is expected to take more than five years to clear. Many media have also attributed the declining quality of U.S. patents and the prevalence of patent trolling to the poor quality of review by the Patent and Trademark Office. Under the pressure of public opinion, the House of Representatives has also set up an independent team to investigate the abuse of remote work. The days of patent office examiners may be over.