3. Obligation to draw attention to easily remediable deficiencies

In T 703/19 the board considered that EPO users could legitimately expect a plausibility check to be carried out on the filing of an appeal. On filing its notice of appeal, the appellant had stated in it that the appeal fee had thereby been paid via the Online Fee Payment service. The letter accompanying subsequently filed items, however, contained information on the kind of fees and the amount payable but nothing on the method of payment, for which "not specified" appeared. The bank account number was missing too. The board considered that this lack of information was clearly at odds with the stated intention of paying the appeal fee on filing notice of appeal. The deficiency had at any rate been readily identifiable as both the accompanying letter and the notice of appeal had contained very little information. The board also held that, although it was the appellant's own responsibility actually to pay the appeal fee, the same did not necessarily go for all related aspects of the process. Were that so, the Enlarged Board would not have concluded in G 2/97 (OJ EPO 1999, 123) that, in the hypothetical example given there, the board ought to have drawn the appellant's attention to a missing cheque. In the board's view, the point of that example had instead been to illustrate a situation where a clearly identifiable intention to perform a procedural act on filing notice of appeal (payment of the appeal fee) was at odds with what had actually been done and this discrepancy was readily identifiable. Both these conditions were met in the case in hand. It had thus been legitimate for the appellant to expect that it would have been alerted to the missing information under the heading "Method of payment", which, since it had filed notice of appeal more than a month before the end of the period available, would have enabled it to pay the appeal fee in time. The board regarded the fee as having been paid in time and deemed the appeal to have been filed.