

(Courtesy: US Patent and Trademark Office)

The president of the union representing federal patent examiners this week called the findings of an internal review that showed some employees repeatedly lied about their hours “unfounded allegations” that are “ridiculous on their face.”

In a morale-boosting e-mail to more than 8,000 examiners and other professional staff at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Robert Budens said the union is working to “set the record straight” on telework abuse the review uncovered.

“Any organization as big as the USPTO (12,000+ employees), whether in the public or private sector, will have a small number of employees who run into difficulties of one sort or another,” Budens, president of the Patent Office Professional Association, wrote Monday in a lengthy missive to his members.

“Instead, what we have are [thousands] of employees who are highly-educated, dedicated professionals who have helped this agency turn the tide on our backlog of both unexamined patent applications…We have managed to accomplish all these goals while taking the USPTO out of the morale basement and to the top of the Best Places to Work in the Federal Government.”

His message comes as top Commerce Department officials prepare to defend the patent office’s telework program on Friday to the House Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees, which have opened an investigation following a Washington Post report.

Commerce officials, who oversee the patent and trademark office, are scheduled to meet with committee staff Friday. The Post reported in August that a review team responding to whistleblower complaints sent from the agency’s watchdog of widespread time and attendance fraud found that some examiners lied about their hours, then received bonuses for work they didn’t do.

The review also revealed that patent office managers have scant oversight over thousands of relatively autonomous examiners who work from home, either full-time or a few days a week.

It showed that few staffers who lied about the hours they were putting in were disciplined. Top patent officials, however, removed the most damaging revelations from the internal report and provided a watered-down version last year to Inspector General Todd Zinser.

Commerce officials, who issued a stern warning to employees that “erroneous time-keeping” is illegal, have opened their own review of the alleged abuses and the effort to hide the most damaging revelations the review team found, sources familiar with the review said.

In a statement, patent officials called the original 32-page report a “rough draft for discussion purposes” that was an “initial attempt to describe the full investigation record.”

They said many of the conclusions were “unsupported by the facts and record of the investigation” and asked the General Counsel’s office to rewrite the report.

Budens told his members that he has been in “almost daily conversations” with senior managers at the patent office since the Post story ran.

His rebuttal aligns closely with a strategy managers plan to use before congressional investigators on Friday, sources familiar with the strategy said.

They plan to defend allegations of poor conduct with performance data showing that patent examiners are given specific times to review an application and that their time is tracked to six-minute intervals.

” There is no way for [thousands] of employees to not be working without getting on the agency’s radar screen and targeted by its disciplinary “guns” – supervisors and employee relations specialists,” Budens wrote.

The union has enjoyed an unusually close relationship with patent managers under the Obama administration. In both reports, supervisors complained that work rules negotiated with the union in recent years prevented them from adequately overseeing the work and conduct of their employees.

Budens defended managers’ decision to alter the original report. He noted that the six-member review team included four human resources officials who are “biased” against examiners. “They’re not trained to do a lot of statistical analyses,” Budens said. “They were putting in the information they wanted to that would strengthen their own positions…They want more power and influence and ability to control employees.”