I think every US practitioner who uses EFS/PAIR has encountered the situation where they upload a document via EFS and classify is as one thing, which is initially how the document is labeled in the image file wrapper (IFW), but then someone at the PTO later re-classifies the document as something else, changing the classification as it appears in the IFW. At least when that's happened to me, the USPTO hasn't changed the date on which the document was filed, although sometimes the re-classification is, in my view, incorrect. (On rare occasions, when I suspected this was going to happen, I have taken a screen shot of the IFW right after uploading, to have as evidence of the reclassification, although the EFS filing acknowledgement also includes the document description that I’ve provided).
This weekend I encountered something I haven't seen before. The background is that I had a phone interview with an examiner in May regarding an OA, and the examiner "mailed" an interview summary in early June. That interview summary showed up in the IFW with the date on which it was posted to the IFW, accompanied by a document I had faxed to the examiner prior to the interview (classified as an "appendix"), as well as the email notification that the PTO sent me to tell me that the interview summary had been posted in PAIR. I subsequently filed a response to the outstanding OA.
On Saturday night, when I opened my email inbox, there was a notice from the PTO – sent on a Saturday, which in itself is already unusual – that an interview summary and appendix had been posted, with the same June date on which the first interview summary was mailed. Both summaries and both appendices now appear in the IFW, showing the same June date. The duplicate documents appear to be identical to the ones originally posted. But there's no record - not in the IFW, not in the transaction history, not in the xml data - that an email notification was sent to me on Saturday. All I have to show for that is the email notification itself.
This is disconcerting. It's bad enough that more than a month after the fact, the PTO can post something and give it an earlier date. (I actually see this a lot with national phase filings, where it can take the PTO until well after I file the ADS and pay the fees and the 30-month deadline has passed to obtain documents from WIPO, which it then posts as if they'd been submitted on the date the ADS was filed and fees paid.) But to do so and yet omit the later-issued email notification that accompanied the ante-dated documents can give the impression that the PAIR user was notified of the ante-dated documents on the earlier date. Suppose that in this case there wasn’t an earlier, timely posting of the documents, only the later posting. Then the applicant would have been robbed of a month or more of response time.
The IFW is the official record of the file. If one needs to appeal within the office, or to take the PTO to court, or establish in adversarial proceedings that some action was taken at a certain time, the IFW is supposed to establish that. See, e.g. 35 U.S.C. 143-146. The fact that the PTO can apparently manipulate the IFW at will, leaving no record of this manipulation, is not a good thing. It may also be illegal under 18 U.S.C. 2071, which the USPTO includes in the “consolidated laws” section of the MPEP.