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.