BUDGETARY RESOURCES AND REQUIREMENTS

Budgetary resources available for spending totaled $1,049.8 million for FY 2001, a 16.3 percent increase over the FY 2000 total of $903.0 million. The USPTO is a financially self-sufficient federal government agency that funds the cost of its operations from user fees rather than appropriations from taxes paid into the general fund of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Major fees are set by statute and activity-based cost accounting techniques assist in approximating fee amounts necessary to recover the costs of our non-statutory fees. The USPTO is continually refining these cost accounting techniques and taking its fee analyses further to improve upon its assessment of fee requirements. As a government agency, the USPTO’s goal is to realize budgetary resources provided through the collection of user fees that are equal to budgetary spending incurred to fill customer orders, as opposed to generating net income.

Temporarily unavailable fee collections occur when the Congress does not allow the USPTO to spend all fees collected during FY 2001. In FY 2001, the USPTO was appropriated $254.9 million from fees collected in FYs 1999 and 2000, leaving only $4.6 million in FY 2000 fees still not available for spending. The USPTO also was appropriated $783.8 million for fees collected during FY 2001. However, during FY 2001, it collected an additional $300.5 million that was not available for spending. Of the $4.6 million and $300.5 million not available for spending in FY 2001, $282.3 million will be appropriated for spending in FY 2002. The USPTO does not know when the remaining $22.8 million from FY 2001 fees will be appropriated.

Although no fees were rescinded during FY 2001, rescissions have reduced a sizeable portion of the fee resources in the past. These amounts were withheld in the annual congressional appropriations process for other government programs. Though Congress removed these amounts from USPTO funding permanently, it was still required to incur the cost to process the applications for which the fee amounts were paid, and conduct business as usual, using funds received from other applications.

The charts [below] show the resources required to meet financial duties compared to the resources available for this purpose. Unfunded liabilities related to earned fee collections, as well as a liability for work to be performed on unearned fee collections, are a measure of commitment to vendors and customers for services the USPTO has already received and orders it has already taken.

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