If NOAA requires specific transactions to be documented at some distant undetermined date, they should establish guidelines rather than all of a sudden stipulating that we produce records which we were under no legal obligation to retain.
The laws have always been extremely clear. Any paperwork that documents your income as reported to the IRS needs to be kept for seven years. Beyond that, you are under no obligation to retain any supporting documentation, and most people simply purge their files every seven years and discard any paperwork that isn’t required.
Now, taking that into consideration, imagine how you would feel if your employer came in and told you that beginning in the next year, your future income was going to be based solely on the number of hours you had worked for the last ten years. You are given a short period of time to dispute the hours the company is reporting for you. The problem of course lies in that you only have documentation of your hours for the last seven years, the amount of time you were legally required to keep those records. Knowing that those missing hours are going to cost you thousands upon thousands of dollars in lost income, I think the first question that might come to mind is: “How can my company base my earnings on figures that cannot be legally verified?”
I recently received an email from a Fisheries Information Specialist with NOAA, dated December 30, 2009 which requested additional information in the form of dealer slips for seventeen different transactions pertaining to my permit history.
With the move to Catch Shares looming in 2010, the history of landings on our commercial permits has become crucial. Moving forward, the amount of fish that we have sold over the past ten years are taken and multiplied by a percentage and the resulting figure is what we will be allowed to catch in the next and future years. The percentage alone represents a drastic cut in our allocations. Add to that lost landings which we have no hope of disputing, and the result is clear; we cannot survive on the unnecessarily small shares we have been given.
As the Specialist himself stated in his email, the transition to Catch Shares is a very challenging process. Aside from the horrendous cutbacks in our allocations, there is the frustrating aspect of the legalities involved with record keeping and the difficult if not impossible task of locating documentation from as long ago as ten years.
According to the IRS website, various paperwork and documentation on specific items of income are required to be legally kept ranging from a period of two years, to a maximum of seven years, depending upon the transaction involved. Consequently, with the massive amount of paperwork already incurred in our industry which we are required to maintain, it is simply not plausible to assume that most of us have documentation on any of these sales prior to 2003.
In light of the multitude of paperwork that NOAA pays its staff to send us each and every week, much of which is redundant and duplicated, would it have been so very difficult for someone to have dropped us a letter back in 1996 that stated: “Hey, hang on to every single piece of paperwork you have ever filled out forever, because you’re going to need it down the road.”
Since the records in question were in fact the certification used to report our income to the IRS, if we were to be required to maintain these records for a period of time longer than what is mandated by the government, then it should have been legally stated as such. I sincerely believe that if this requirement were to be challenged, demanding us to provide records in excess of seven years old in order to determine our allocations, it would be found to be illegal at best, certainly at the very least, unethical. If in the future, NOAA is going to require specific transactions to be documented at some distant undetermined date, then perhaps they should establish guidelines rather than all of a sudden stipulating that we produce records which we were under no legal obligation to retain.
As I am certain you are aware, the changeover to Catch Shares is going to cripple many of our regions fisherman and effectively eliminate as much as 50% of our local fleet simply through the transition alone. To further impair our ability to make a living by basing our allocations on history that we have no hope of legally fighting is perhaps the biggest injustice of all.
Jay Driscoll is captain of the fishing vessel Karenlyn of Rye Harbor, NH