America-Israel Patent Law Blog

I have a case that received a notice of allowance from the Israel PTO.  The “acceptance fee” (equivalent to the “issue fee” in the USA) is due October 10, 2025.  I paid the fee earlier this month. But yesterday I received a warning letter from the ILPTO, telling me that the fee had not yet been paid and that if it wasn’t paid by the deadline, the application would be deemed abandoned.

So I wrote to the person in charge of the ILPTO’s electronic filing system, who is also the chief examiner for the whole office, pointing out the problem. I received a response by the end of the day, so good for that. But the response said, “This issue is the result of a system bug, which is currently under treatment. We have deleted the reminder from the system” [emphasis added].

Not acceptable.  The letter was sent. The proper response would have been to send a new letter, rescinding the first letter, but leaving both in the electronic record.

This is another example of the Israel PTO manipulating the electronic record of a patent application, which is the official record of the case. I wrote about another such instance last month.

It’s the sort of thing one would expect from a communist country, like pre-1990’s Romania. Which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the place from where the letter purger hails.