To punish a fishing company that violates federal law that regulates the activity, the Federal Government can take over ten years. That's one of the conclusions of the General Audit Office (AGN, for its acronym in Spanish), after a report on "the lack of efficiency and effectiveness" of the National Directorate of Fisheries and Aquaculture in its role as "controller" of existing rules. According to the AGN, the amount of time taken by the Directorate means that from the verification of the violation to the proceeding “three to five years" pass, and that, once the investigation is ongoing, the penalty can take up to eight years before its effective.

Another shortcoming that the AGN detected is that the inspectors of the Directorate of Fisheries perform their task, both in port -to control the equipment of Fishermen-, and on board ships -during fishing, "without specific training" and that the frequency of these inspections do not conform to the magnitude of the activity.

The Audit conducted their study between March 1998 and July 2001. During the first year of analysis, fishing was 3.5% of the country’s total exports, 900 million, 200 million more than was exported in beef. During that time the fishing industry had 234 plants, 67 cooperatives filleting, and employed 12,500 people. Today, there are 16,000registered employees, plus 4000 unregistered workers.

Apart from the impact of the activity on the national economy, the AGN detailed the lack of shelter in the preservation of the resources that the country, especially hake and squid, which is another of the responsibilities of the Directorate of Fisheries. In 1998, for example, there was a 39% overfishing to that authorized by the National Institute for Fisheries Research and Development, and a year later, there was a surplus of 185%. Depredation with no control over those resources generated a 30% decrease in fish volumes between 1997 and 1999. Beyond the work of the Audit, a more recent study by the Argentina Wildlife Foundation, said the level of exploitation of hake is pushing the species toward collapse, which also endangers the direct and indirect jobs generated by the industry.