[Leif]

Kurkul admitted data errors in 2007

By Richard Gaines
Staff Writer


Two years before the National Marine Fisheries Service acknowledged widespread mistakes in catch histories it calculates that will determine groundfish earnings in the coming New England catch share/sector-based fishing system, the regional administrator admitted the data assembling system was a mess.

Patricia Kurkul, regional administrator of NMFS, said responsibility for the errors is "shared" by the agency and "the fishing industry."

In a July 12, 2007, letter to Daniel Furlong, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which is based in Dover, Del., Kurkul wrote that "we strive for maintaining information that is an accurate record of an individual fishing activity in federally regulated fisheries.

"However," she said, "given the amount of data we receive and process each year, currently exceeding 1 million records, errors do occur on both the reporting side by the fishing industry and on processing the reports submitted.

"The responsibility for ensuring that we do have this information rests on both parties," Kurkul wrote.

The region she administrators runs from the Canadian border through the Carolinas.

"How does one build a house without a foundation?" Furlong wrote in an e-mail to the Times. "When it comes to catch shares and one's livelihood, it behooves us all to have accurate and verifiable records."

But he said "unless the harvesting sector initiates its own quality control process to verify the NMFS records, it will be held hostage, and therefore bound and accountable to the records NMFS has on file."

The importance of catch histories and accurate calculations has been highlighted by the transition into sectors and catch shares. The New England groundfishery will be split into two different business models next May — the sectors, which are fishing cooperatives, will work off catch shares whose size is related to catch histories. The rest of the fishermen who have decided against joining a sector will fish under modified effort controls and days at sea.

The entire fishery currently is governed by effort controls.

Faulty records have also been cited as triggering erroneous prosecutions of fishermen for violating their catch quotas or days at sea.

The Inspector General of the Department of Commerce, the parent agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration which includes NMFS, has been investigating NMFS' enforcement practices since the start of summer.

Kurkul said she understood that the conversion of fisheries into "Limited Access Privilege Programs," such as the catch share sector model to be instituted for groundfish in 2010 in New England, requires "accurate accountings of each vessel's landings history."

The New England Fishery Management Council last June voted to use a 10-year history of catches, starting in 1996, to determine individual catch shares — the percentage of the total allowable catch for the fishery granted as a limited access privilege.

Kurkul's spokeswoman Maggie Mooney-Seus has said the agency cannot process the complaints and fix the errors in time for the start of sector fishing via catch shares next May. But she said the service will fix mistakes for 2011 that are noted in writing to NMFS by Oct. 31.

Erroneous computations of catch histories will produce erroneous grants of catch share — and because of the decision to split the total allowable catch, for each loser there will be a winner.

In recent days, many New England fishermen have concluded that the catch histories that were distributed by Kurkul's statisticians were dramatically off, shorting some by hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish landed and certified by the dealer sales slips.

Their complaints added to those of scallopers in a lawsuit against NMFS which cited a set of minutes of a NMFS committee meeting from March 2006 where members conceded "continuously discovering ... many errors in vessel trip reports and dealer data-sets" that were considered beyond NMFS ability to reconcile or fix.