Sure. Thank you for the question.
Basically, the approach we took was this: In the first place, we asked the department if they now have any systematic way of tracking whether the coverage and timeliness requirements of providing the data were met. We found there is no such thing as a systematic way of doing this.
Therefore, what we did was dig further by having the department open their books and search their records to find the answer to the question for us, though not for the 156 fish stocks. There are 130 that are subject to observer company data and collecting catch data from the fishing industry. This is an explanation for why the graphics you see in our report are a bit complicated: It's because we found many problems. To a large extent, we found that either the monitoring programs were not fully implemented or the department could not tell because the records wouldn't allow them to.
In a number of cases, the answer was, “Yes, we have the information, and here's the answer: The coverage was met.” In cases when the coverage was met in a timely way, we could not audit everything because it's too large a population. We took a sample. Almost consistently, while looking at those samples.... The purpose of samples was to generalize the whole population and have simple graphics in our report. However, that was not possible because, almost consistently, the audit found either more cases of non-compliance or more cases of the department not being able to provide the data.
At the end of the day, the data presented in our report is what we found for the negative cases, I would say. There could be more than that, but we could not get to the bottom of it.