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GCN Home > August 21, 2000 issue

Web service reels in savings

E-commerce helps NMFS reduce delays and costs for issuing fishing permits

By Patricia Daukantas
GCN Staff

The National Marine Fisheries Service has dived into electronic commerce by issuing its tuna fishing permits via the Web.

Over the last two years, electronic permitting has greatly reduced the delays and costs of manually processing paper forms, said Mark Murray-Brown, a fisheries manager with the Highly Migratory Species Division of the fisheries service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.


Whether a fishing boat owner has a computer or a phone, the NMFS Permit Shop can speed up the application process for obtaining a bluefin tuna fishing permit.


The back-end systems behind the public Web site let NOAA administrators manage and upload new content to the site’s database, said Timothy M. O’Connor, vice president of marketing for electronic-government solutions at AppNet Inc. of Bethesda, Md. AppNet developed the site.

Vice President Al Gore’s office recently presented a Hammer Award to the NMFS Permit Shop Web site, at www.nmfspermits.com, for making a significant contribution to reinventing government.

The site specializes in permits for commercial and recreational fishing of one salt-water species, the bluefin tuna.

Japan has a lucrative sushi market for bluefin tuna caught in the northern Atlantic Ocean, Murray-Brown said. Commercial-size fish, which must exceed 73 inches in length, are shipped overnight from New England to Tokyo.

By law, bluefin tuna fishing requires a permit from the fisheries service. Until a few years ago, “a row of desks with people” processed permit applications by hand, Murray-Brown said. Because the agency didn’t have the staff to license all fishing boats annually, each year it mailed out about 5,000 tuna permits that were valid for three years.

Reeling in red tape

Processing a permit manually took an average of one month, Murray-Brown said, and boat owners didn’t always get their permits in time for the start of a fishing tournament or the fishing season.

“If the fishermen weren’t organized and ready, there would be trouble,” Murray-Brown said. Some days his staff was sidetracked from other duties to handle calls from frantic procrastinators.



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