American Seafoods Group in Seattle, Wash., USA, has settled scale-tampering charges brought against it by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), paying one of the largest fines in the agency’s history.
American Seafoods will pay a combined penalty of USD 1.75 million (1.4 milion EUR) for three civil enforcement cases from charges brought in May 2013. At the time, NOAA said that three of American’s Alaska pollock fishing vessels — American Dynasty, Ocean Rover and Northern Eagle — adjusted their flow scales to record lower weights back in 2007, 2008, 2011 and 2012.
“It is one of NOAA’s largest civil penalties ever imposed,” Julie Speegle, public affairs officer for the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Alaska region, told SeafoodSource.
While the resulting penalty is hefty, it is significantly less than the agency’s original penalty of USD 2.8 million (2.2 million EUR). "NOAA believes that a $1.75 million civil penalty appropriately accomplishes its enforcement goals,” Speegle said.
American Seafoods executives declined to comment on the financial impact of the penalty on the company, but said they were satisfied with the settlement.
“We are satisfied with the outcome of these cases, which highlighted the complexities of operating, maintaining, calibrating and testing sensitive equipment like flow scales in the demanding environment of an at-sea processor,” said Inge Andreassen, president of American Seafood, in a statement.
“Our cooperative dialogue with NOAA has helped us improve our internal procedures and, we believe, will improve the agency’s oversight of flow scale matters throughout the fleet,” Andreassen added.
In fact, American Seafoods has added several new flow-scale compliance measures. The initiatives include: creating a compliance hotline to allow confidential and anonymous reports on regulatory concerns; adding and improving the placement of cameras that monitor the flow-scale area; implementing new testing protocols; conducting independent third-party audits of flow-scale records following each season and improving the training of our personnel on flow-scale maintenance and operation.
Separate from the American Seafoods’ cases, NMFS has proposed a change to its flow-scale regulations that would tighten daily scale testing standards, require that test results be electronically reported to NMFS, improve the agency’s ability to detect accidental or intentional introduction of scale bias and require flow-scale video monitoring aboard all catcher-processors using at-sea scales.
