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ExpectMore.govExpectMore.gov home pageEXPECT FEDERAL PROGRAMS TO PERFORM WELL, AND BETTER EVERY YEAR.
Program Assessment

Program

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U.S. Patent and Trademark Office - Patents

The purpose of the program is to issue patents. Patents provide protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions.

Rating

What This Rating Means

PERFORMING
Moderately Effective

In general, a program rated Moderately Effective has set ambitious goals and is well-managed. Moderately Effective programs likely need to improve their efficiency or address other problems in the programs' design or management in order to achieve better results.
  • The Patents organization has improved the quality of examinations. USPTO improved its final allowance compliance rate, which measures whether decisions made by examiners are correctly made according to applicable statutes. Also, the in-process compliance rate, which measures the accuracy of initial examiner decisions, has increased since 2001.
  • The percentage of applications filed and managed electronically has greatly increased. The percentage of applications filed electronically has increased nearly 5-fold, since 2006. Also, nearly all patent applications are managed electronically while they are at the USPTO.
  • Improvements still need to be made on patent wait times. While the USPTO is receiving record patent applications, more process improvements need to be made to alleviate wait times.

Improvement Plan

About Improvement Plans

We are taking the following actions to improve the performance of the program:

  • Undertaking an evaluation of the underlying assumptions used to establish examiner production goals.
  • Reviewing the current patent fee structure.
  • Undertaking an examination of the impact of the patent system.

Learn More

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