USPTO Requires Registered Practitioners to Create Financial Manager Accounts

A Deposit Account is the USPTO's preferred mechanism for customers to pay fees. It eliminates the need to submit a check, credit card or other payment each time a fee is required. Instead, a USPTO deposit account is a pre-paid reserve that a customer can use to pay fees to the USPTO. Until recently, each deposit account was associated with a customer (for example, a law firm or a corporation), and any person associated with the entity (for example, a patent agent, patent attorney) could authorize the USPTO to charge fees to the deposit account associated with the customer.

However, the USPTO has recently made a change to improve security. Effective March 15, any charge to a deposit account may only be made by a person listed in the USPTO's Financial Manager (the USPTO's deposit account management system) as having fee payer permissions. Failure to do so will result in a fee being considered not paid. Financial Manager accounts can be created here. Additional information about the Financial Manager accounts can be found by visiting the Financial Manager website or in a helpful video posted by the USPTO.

Fish's registered practitioners have already created Financial Manager accounts. Clients who have their own deposit accounts will need to add their representative practitioners as authorized users of such deposit accounts.

Prepared with Alycia Morell, Patent Prosecution Training Administrator