Backlog of unexamined patent applications

In particular, such delays reduce a startup's employment and sales growth, chances of survival, access to external capital, and future innovation.

On February 2, 1981, the U.S. News and World Report wrote: "The U.S. patent process is so sluggish, outdated and undependable that it is contributing to the decline of innovation in America.

At the same time the voluminosity of (the number of words in) patent applications keeps increasing due to legislative and judicial changes that demand greater disclosure.

[15] A study of 10,000 patent applications filed with the USPTO in January 2002 found that the grant rate of individual examiners increases with the length of their tenure.

For example, Alison Brimelow, former president of the EPO, stated that the "backlog of patent applications is counter-productive to legal certainty, and that has a negative effect on the innovation process".

[20] According to a 2010 study by London School of Economics, "the cost to the global economy of the delay in processing patent applications may be as much as £7.65 billion each year.

In 2014 Frakes and Wasserman[22] found that the examination fees paid by the applicants cover no more than 30% of the USPTO budget, since 1991 when the Agency became "almost entirely user-fee financed".

[23] On top of this, the USPTO, as the only federal agency that actually generates revenue to be self-sufficient, has been a subject of fee diversion by the US Congress.

In April 2011, Congress announced appropriations for the remaining five months of FY2011 that would result in $100 million in USPTO fees being diverted to other federal programs".

[25][26][27] In their 2017 study, Frakes and Wasserman argued,[23] that the patent backlog problem cannot be solved without increasing USPTO's revenues.

The most effective USPTO practice of raising its revenues takes advantage of the lack of unity of invention definition in the US patent law, and of non-judicable nature of examiner's restriction requirement to split original application into numerous divisionals (each of these divisionals charges a separate set fees, even though the content(text) of each application in the family that the examiner reads is the same).

For example, Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) was set up in 2006, in order to avoid the duplication of search and examination work.