Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today.

The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said.

Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it.This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate and generating tons of concerned comments about the current trends and directions of the USPTO.  

According to an IDG News Service story, the House in September passed a patent reform bill — supported by many large tech vendors, but opposed by several small tech companies — but similar legislation has been stalled in the Senate. Large tech vendors, including Microsoft, IBM and Symantec, have called for patent reform, saying it’s too easy for companies with no intention of creating products to buy up patents and file multimillion-dollar infringement lawsuits against other companies.  On Jan. 22, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said patent reform was a priority, but it was in a line behind several other bills, including an economic stimulus package and a government surveillance authorization bill. The Senate would turn to patent reform, “time permitting,” he said then.

In the meantime the USPTO is being overwhelmed, the GAO said. In its report it said that while the USPTO is hiring as many new patent examiners as it has the annual funding and institutional capacity to support, attrition has continued to increase among patent examiners—one patent examiner has been lost for nearly every two hired over the last 5 years. For example, from the beginning of fiscal year 2002 through fiscal year 2006, USPTO hired 3,672 patent examiners. However, the patent examination workforce only increased by 1,644 because 1,643 patent examiners left the agency and 385 patent examiners were either transferred or promoted out of the position of patent examiner.

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