THE MANAGEMENT OF QUALITY-CONTROL AND QUALITY ASSURANCE SYSTEMS IN FISHERIES SCIENCE

Quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) procedures can increas e the quality of data from fisheries programs at minimal cost. I obser ve four principles in the implementation and development of a QC-QA sy stem for fisheries programs: (1) People want to do high-quality work a nd will do high-quality work when provided with standard operating pro cedures and training; (2) it is easier and less expensive to prevent d ata and procedural errors than to correct them; (3) the quality of dat a will improve if workers are given feedback on the quality of their w ork; and (4) high-quality data occurs when procedures are instituted t hat make collecting data correctly easy, rather than increasing inspec tion and supervision.