J L
Nov 17, 2014
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Featured
Will Patent Office Managers Monitor Their Staffs to Stop Fraud?
As they prepare to testify before Congress on Tuesday about what they are doing to ward off time and attendance fraud, officials at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are negotiating with the agency’s three unions over new tools for managers to monitor their staffs. The agency’s generous agreements with its unions are viewed by many observers as a major roadblock to more rigorous oversight of patent examiners who lied about their hours and received bonuses and overtime for work they didn’t do, abuses discovered by an internal review last year.Managers are prohibited, for example, from requiring employees they supervise to put a device on their computers that shows when they are working, a tool unions call an invasion of privacy. Examiners who work from home, the majority of the workforce, have 24 hours to respond to a telephone call from their boss. There is no requirement that examiners tell their supervisors when they plan to work, as long as the work gets done.