The House of Representatives Wednesday passed a bill that would make the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PT0) a government corporation.
Under the legislation, employees would be eligible for performance-based bonuses. The chief operating officer of the agency could earn up to double his or her senior executive level pay by meeting pre-set performance goals each year. That could translate into a pay package of more than $200,000 a year for the COO.
"That is dependent on whether management goals that are agreed to are filled," said PTO Commissioner Bruce Lehman in an interview with Govexec.com.
The legislation, sponsored by Howard Coble, R-N.C., chairman of the House Judiciary Courts and Intellectual Property Subcommittee, calls for PTO to become a government corporation, similar in some respects to the U.S. Postal Service or the Tennessee Valley Authority. PTO would survive on the revenues it takes in from fees for patents and trademarks, like the Postal Service, and its chief operating officer will be appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, just as the TVA's board of directors is presidentially appointed. Lehman said the new corporation would also draw from Vice President Gore's performance-based organization model for its operating rules.
Under the act, PTO offices that deal with intellectual property policy, and not directly with the business operation of issuing patents, would be transferred out of the PTO and into the Commerce Department under a new undersecretary of Commerce for intellectual property issues. The PTO corporation would then focus on the day-to-day business of issuing patents. It would also no longer be held accountable to the Office of Management and Budget, the General Services Administration, and other central policy agencies and would be freed from many of the procurement and personnel restrictions other federal agencies must abide by.
The Vice President's model focuses on separating policy functions from service delivery, and making government organizations that deliver services operate more like private sector businesses.
As part of the Commerce Department, the Patent and Trademark Office currently turns the fees it collects over to the Treasury. As a corporation, however, it would keep all of its fees.
If PTO happened to find itself with a significant profit, "then presumably we would lower the fees," Lehman said.
Though Lehman said agencies that are fee-funded are more likely to be candidates for performance-based organizations, he said the model does not preclude agencies that receive their funding from Congress.
Asked what the difference is between a government corporation and a performance-based organization, the term the Clinton administration uses, Lehman said it is primarily a "semantic" difference.
Lehman said that although the administration compromised on some portions of the bill, if the legislation makes it through the Senate, "the result will be that PTO will become the first truly performance-based organization."
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