A federal investigation has found that thousands of workers at U.S. Patent and Trademark Office put in for nearly 300,000 hours they never worked, The Washington Post reports.
The scheme resulted in taxpayers being socked for more than $18 million — and it could be double that number — the independent watchdog for the Commerce Department, the patent office's parent agency concluded.
Investigators made the discovery by analyzing the 2014 and 2015 agency computer records of employees who review patents for the federal government. They concluded the hours never worked could have helped the patent office clear a backlog of 550,000 applications.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, told the newspaper: "The amount of wasted man-hours that could have been spent reducing the patent backlog is astounding, not to mention the millions of taxpayer dollars that were wasted paying employees for work they were not doing."
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