Message from the Chief Financial Officer
Message from the Chief Financial Officer
I am pleased to present the USPTO's FY 2005 Performance and Accountability Report . For a third consecutive year, the USPTO was awarded the Association of Government Accountants' Certificate of Excellence in Accountability Reporting for its FY 2004 Performance and Accountability Report . We also received an unqualified opinion from our independent auditors on the USPTO's FY 2005 financial statements for a 13th consecutive year. This "clean" opinion was issued together with no reported material weaknesses or reportable conditions in the design and operation of our system of internal control.
USPTO's fee modernization bill was enacted in FY 2005. This major change provided resources to enhance our capabilities to meet the goals of our 21st Century Strategic Plan of high quality and timely issuance of patents and registration of trademarks, increased electronic government, and work sharing initiatives worldwide. The additional funds available to the USPTO allowed us to increase the number of patent examiners, which will greatly assist in reducing pendency levels caused by the growing average complexity of applications and increasing workloads.
These advancements serve to improve us as an agency and allow us to protect intellectual property in the United States and abroad. We will continue supporting the USPTO's role in structuring new multilateral and bilateral agreements with other intellectual property offices and promoting global harmonization of law in order to strengthen the rights of our intellectual property holders and provide international protection for their inventions.
The USPTO separated the offices of the Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Administrative Officer this year. This organizational change will allow the organization to focus on the continued improvement of USPTO financial and performance information, which will result in better decision-making, improve utilization of resources, and support the President's Management Agenda for competitive sourcing, improved financial performance, budget and performance integration, and expanded electronic government.
The 21st Century Strategic Plan identified new approaches for performing work using competitive sourcing. During the current year, we were able to implement some of these approaches. We successfully completed two competitions for commercial activities, including classification of patent pre-grant publication documents and mail fulfillment operations. In addition, we have competitively sourced search activities associated with the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) process. This activity serves as a pilot for competitively sourcing the search of national cases in accordance with the requirements of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2005 (Public Law 108-447) and our efforts to utilize our resources in the most productive manner will continue in the future.
We continued to strengthen our internal review program and performed more internal control reviews than any single year to date. Further, we continued to emphasize the importance of internal control certifications required by our management to provide the annual assurance, which is required under the FMFIA. Our periodic evaluation process, together with our strong management oversight, and continued commitment to improvements in internal control allow me to provide reasonable assurance that the USPTO's systems of internal accounting and administrative control fully comply with the requirements of the FMFIA for FY 2005. This existing internal control review program positioned the USPTO for full compliance with the new requirements for internal controls over financial reporting outlined in the Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) revised Circular A-123, Management's Responsibility for Internal Control .
Having attained a reliable process for preparing financial statements, we continue to identify areas of financial management for further improvement. During FY 2005, we revised our key monthly management report to include enhanced planned performance and spending compared against actual performance and spending results, with forecasts for the remainder of the year. This report allows management to continually monitor financial and program performance against plans to take timely corrective action.
The USPTO continues to realize the benefits of the electronic government initiatives that were put in place as a part of our 21st Century Strategic Plan . These initiatives were taken to provide services that are tailored to customer needs, as well as to improve the efficiency of our processing systems. During the current year, we saw an increased use of the internet for patent and trademark applications and searches on-line. Our electronic fee receipts for patent and trademark products and services increased by 19 percent during FY 2005 as compared to the prior fiscal year.
In the upcoming year, we will continue to focus our efforts on the initiatives related to the President's Management Agenda, improve our financial management systems, and enhance our internal control program. Our goals remain to provide timely, reliable, and useful financial management information to USPTO management and to serve our customers as best as we can.
Howard N. Goldberg
Acting Chief Financial Officer
November 2, 2005
