The Commerce Department's Office of the Inspector General has released a report detailing the results of its investigation into extensive goldbricking practices by paralegals at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Apparently, the Board hired a raft of paralegals a couple of years back, as part of a plan to expand the staffing at the Board. Unfortunately, before they could hire the Administrative Patent Judges that would be handing out work to those new paralegals, the Federal Government instituted a hiring freeze. As a result, these new paralegals didn't have much to do. But since they're Federal Government employees, they have to account for their time, which they reported under a "miscellaneous" heading.
They then spent that time doing laundry, gardening, watching TV, whatever.
I'm not going to defend paying government employees to not work. Nevertheless, I think it's important to bear a couple of things in mind in connection with this story.
First, the USPTO is entirely funded by user fees. So no taxpayer dollars were wasted here. Patent applicant dollars were wasted.
Second, if the USPTO had received permission from the government to spend their own money, as they've asked to do for EVER, the APJs that would have been giving work to these paralegals would have been hired at the same time, and this whole thing never would have happened. At least not on this scale.
I don't blame the paralegals. Apparently they tried to get work, but the work just wasn't there. Maybe they should have been laid off, but anyone who has ever dealt with any government agency knows that cutting anything is seen as an admission that you don't need as big a budget, which will result in cuts next appropriations time. This is not a USPTO problem; it's a government budgeting problem.
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