A lot of the surveyors are associated with NOAA and not the DFG and thus no fear in reporting your catch. But there should be no fear anyways. You should know the regs well enough to not break the rules with whatever it is you're doing.
Its a big deal that they get accurate catch information. At a conference I was at recently, they were talking about the problems associated with not haven't a level of precision in data collection for the recreational take of fish like they do for the commercial fleet. Its like anything in science, as the "n" gets smaller, the standard deviation most commonly gets bigger and the tendancy for the California legislature is to use the most "conservative" estimate (most restrictive) when deciding on matters such as the MPA's. There was even talk of using sportboat daily reports as a means of data collection. Its a good thing those are NEVER inflated
. Be as precise as possible with those people. Accurate data beats the absence of data every time for us as fisherman, takes a lot of the leeway out of bending data during decision making.