Justification for change

JUSTIFICATION FOR CHANGE

ALASKA INTERAGENCY ELECTRONIC REPORTING SYSTEM (IERS)

OMB CONTROL NO. 0648-0515

Justification: The buying station report has been transferred from OMB Control No. 0648-0213 and its format has been changed from paper to online data entry called tLandings. This change was described in the OMB Control No. 0648-0213 revision/extension, approved by OMB on 3/27/2015; however, a corresponding change request for OMB Control No. 0648-0515 had not yet been submitted.

The Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens Act) 16 U.S.C. 1801 et seq. authorizes the North Pacific Fishery Management Council to prepare and amend fishery management plans for any fishery in waters under its jurisdiction. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), Alaska Region manages the crab fisheries in the waters off the coast of Alaska under the Fishery Management Plan for Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Crab. NMFS manages groundfish under the Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for the Groundfish Fishery of the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands and the Fishery Management Plan for Groundfish of the Gulf of Alaska (FMPs). Regulations implementing the FMPs appear at 50 CFR parts 679 and 680.

The Interagency Electronic Reporting System (IERS) is the result of a partnership between NMFS, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), and International Pacific Halibut Commission (IPHC). IERS minimizes the burden and maximizes the utility of fisheries information created, collected, maintained, used, disseminated, and retained. The use of IERS incorporates the goals of the Government Paperwork Elimination Act by ensuring that information technology is acquired, used, and managed to improve performance of agency missions, including the reduction of information collection burdens on the public.

Previously, the operator or manager of a buying station that received or delivered groundfish harvested from the Gulf of Alaska or the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Management Area from a catcher vessel in association with a shoreside processor, SFP, or a mothership needed to complete by hand on paper and retain a copy of each separate Buying station report (BSR) for each delivery of unprocessed groundfish or donated prohibited species received from a catcher vessel on behalf of an associated processor. A copy of the BSR would accompany each groundfish delivery from the landing site to the

associated processor.

The Buying station report (BSR) is being operationally replaced with a processor tender interface called tLandings which is accessed through eLandings. Records created on a computer onboard a tender during deliveries from catcher vessels are transferred to a thumb drive and delivered with the catch to the processor. The records on the thumb drive are uploaded by the processor. For a description of this thumb drive operation, go to: https://elandings.atlassian.net/wiki/display/doc/Processor+Tender+Interface+Users+Guide.

The estimated time to complete a tLandings is 10 minutes. The format change does not result in increased burden or cost, because the activities of the Buying Station are the same. If anything, the burden and cost for using tLandings would be less due to its electronic format. However, at this time, we are making no changes to the burden estimate of this information collection, which we are now adding to OMB Control No. 0648-0515: 1750 responses and 671 hours (no recordkeeping/reporting costs).

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