So it has been a fundamental rule of the Fisheries Act for a very long time—since 1986—that when commercial fishers catch quota species of a legal size, they must land and report those catches. It's always been illegal to dump fish, but the system had relied on honest reporting. What the Simmons report and Operation Hippocamp and Operation Achilles showed—which enforcement staff in the Ministry of Fisheries undertook because of the ministry's recognition of this ongoing problem of under-reporting and misreporting—was that there was a lot of dishonesty in the industry. 