Manufacturing Industry

Patent Office can't keep enough examiners

Manufacturing & Technology News, Oct 17, 2007

The Patent and Trademark Office will have a difficult time whittling away at its patent application backlog because examiners are overworked and are leaving the agency, according to a survey of examiners conducted by the Government Accountability Office. The agency has not changed its requirements on the number of patents an examiner has to process since 1976. Yet patents have become more complex and difficult to analyze, forcing 70 percent of examiners to work overtime without pay to meet their production goals. As a result, over the past five years, one patent examiner has quit his job for every two who have been hired.

"This represents a significant loss to the agency because 70 percent of those who left had been at the agency for less than five years and new patent examiners are primarily responsible for the actions that remove applications from the backlog," says the GAO, The agency hires examiners based on its budget, not on what would be needed to reduce its backlog. As a result, "it is unlikely that the agency will be able to reduce the growing backlog simply through its hiring efforts," says the GAO.

Managers at the Patent and Trademark Office say that most people quit because of personal reasons. But that's not what the survey of 1,420 patent examiners revealed. Sixty-seven percent of examiners said they left because production goals were too difficult to meet. "These production goals are based on the number of applications patent examiners must complete biweekly and have not been adjusted to reflect the complexity of patent applications since 1976," says the GAO in its report "USPTO: Hiring Efforts Are Not Sufficient to Reduce the Patent Application Backlog" (GAO-07-1102), located at www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrept/GAO-07-1102.>