Purpose of reconciliation
When a Landing Report (and associated fish ticket) with halibut and/or sablefish IFQ is generated in elandings, there is a "child" IFQ report that is also generated. The IFQ report contains information specific to the IFQ species and is submitted to the NMFS IFQ database to debit the IFQ permit holder's account. If there are mistakes or edits that need to be made to the IFQ report, the process processor is unable to make changes to the IFQ system (in other words they are not allowed to edit their IFQ account). Instead, they must contact the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement (OLE) through the OLE Data Techs office and request permission to make an edit to their IFQ infformationinformation. This edit is then completed through a manual landing process Manual Landing Report. And the manual landing will result in edits to the NMFS IFQ database. However, the manual landing process does not change the original landing report in elandings. So the processor must also get into elandings and make the same edits to their landing report.
Periodically, agency staff review eLanding landing reports (fish tickets) and IFQ reports to verify that both reports were submitted, and that the IFQ pounds and species condition codes are correctly documented on both reports. The landing report and the IFQ report should have identical landed weights and delivery condition codes. The primary reason why landing reports and IFQ reports are out-of-balance is the creation of a manual landing that is entered by NMFS Data Technicians and failure by processing staff to then document the changes to the landing within the eLandings System, or a manual adjustment of the IFQ poundage and failure to adjust the landing report to reflect the identical poundage.
It is important for data quality (both on the IFQ reports and on fish tickets in elandings) and for cost recovery fee assessment and billing that we reconcile the two and make sure that they match. The reconciliation process compares the 2 data sets, identifies issues, and outlines a process for agency staff to coordinate with processors to fix any errors or mis-matches.
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