Law clerks at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office did almost no work for years on end, and when managers learned that an investigation into the idleness was underway, they were assigned busywork like writing a “history” report on the agency.
But the history was never published, and the agency appears to be so embarrassed about the debacle now that officials refused Thursday to release the report under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Washington Examiner.
The agency said that 40 pages were written, but that they were a “draft record, the release of which may be harmful to the USPTO.”
Though a feel-good summary of an obscure federal body is hardly the stuff of CIA secrets, Ricou Heaton, the agency’s FOIA officer, said it “would disclose editorial judgments and chill honest and creative drafting.”
In this case, is appears that there was little editorial process going on, because no final version of the “draft” was released.
A July 2014 investigation by the Commerce Department’s Inspector General found that dozens of paralegals making $60,000 to $80,000 a year had been openly doing nothing since 2010.
Their supervisors even instructed them to fill out timecards for “Other Time” instead of categories indicating they had done work. They were allowed to “work” from home and they got performance bonuses of up to $3,500 each.
“OIG asked members of PTAB management whether they considered laying off Paralegal Specialists,” but they didn’t because of “all the union issues,” the report said.
After three paralegals blew the whistle and managers became aware that an investigation was underway, they tried to come up with busywork, and “some Paralegal Specialists were assigned to a project writing an article on the history of the PTAB,” it noted.
Patent Office spokesman Paul Fucito would not say why the agency was hiding the report.
