The consequences of absence of availability of commercial data for the assessment of abalone in zones A and B are examined by assuming an absence of commercial data over the past five years. This results in the extent of uncertainty about current resource size roughly doubling, and of about current poaching levels roughly increasing by a factor of 1.5 for Zone A and 2.5 (i.e. more than double) for Zone B. These results point towards a substantial deterioration in ability to assess the abalone resource with reasonable precision in the next few years in the absence of trend information previously provided by CPUE data.