Report on ongoing Progress in the Development of Candidate Management Procedures for the Canadian Pollock in the in the Western Component (4Xopqrs+5Zc)

Management Procedure testing is continued with the introduction of further robustness tests and the inclusion of a penalty term in the TAC formula if the survey abundance estimates fall below a threshold level. This penalty term does improve performance in terms of resource conservation risk for both the Reference Set of Operating Models and the robustness tests examined, though the improvement is slight even for relatively large sacrifices in catch. There is minimal increase in resource risk if reducing the interannual TAC change constraint from 20% to 15%.