Patent Workers Paid To Exercise, Shop And Do Chores, Investigation Reveals

Dozens of employees working for an obscure federal agency went years with little work to do, allowing them to collect salaries and bonuses while they shopped online, caught up on chores, watched television or walked the dog, an investigation revealed Tuesday.

The probe by the Commerce Department’s inspector general found that paralegals at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s appeals board were paid more than $5 million for their time even though there was so little work for them to do that supervisors didn’t care how they used it.

“I almost don’t blame [paralegals] for watching TV because, I mean, you’re sitting around for 800 hours,” one chief judge told the investigators, who found that supervisors not only tolerated the problem but in one instance admonished an employee who complained about the lack of work.

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