MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) - Two senior members of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee are pressing for information about how the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office guards against time and attendance abuses by employees.
Chairman Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and ranking member Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, made the demand in response to an inspector general’s report pointing to such abuses in the office.
The Inspector General’s report analyzed data to account for work hours by patent examiners and found that the patent office was unable to account for 288,479 hours of work over a 15-month period.
The senators say that unaccounted for work may have resulted in more than $18 million of waste.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.