Philatelic Foundation Vs. Professional Stamp Experts

Well, on another thread, I suggested someone get a PSE cert because they usually come back quicker than PF certs. Four people chimed in and said, "Ooooh - I wouldn't trust PSE with THAT!" Why? This forum is all about education, so the point would be to educate everyone why use the PF over the PSE for certification.

Ideally, certification organizations would publish their 'track record' so consumers would be better able to make an informed purchasing decision. It would be best to break down the 'track record' by 'area' (i.e. country, era, catalog section, etc.). I assume that this kind of analysis would also benefit the organization, revealing which areas were the strongest and which areas could use some improvement.

Mentioning this in past on this forum resulted in several folks not agreeing with me. There seems to be support for maintaining a degree of ambiguity and opaqueness to the expertzation process (i.e. which expert were the ones who actually put eyes on the material, track records, etc.). I assume part of the justification is that some of the experts are volunteers and would rather not have angry people flaming/hunting them down at shows and online.
Don

PSE claims it has in-house experts for US stamps; APEX does not - the stamps are sent to external experts, usually at least three different ones. I don't know about PF's in-house staffing.

PSE tells me that both they and PF use the same four external experts for Canal Zone stamps (there are few CZ experts left alive). I've had many CZ issues expertized, and it usually takes 9 weeks to get the certs back.

Apparently the big dealers and auction firms send large numbers of stamps for certification, especially ahead of big national shows or a major auction. I have to believe those big orders get priority over individual collectors.

That said, past threads on this same topic seem to favor PF over PSE for U.S. Classics and truly unusual/scarce/rare issues.

I prefer external "experts" to a certain degree. If you use the same 4 or so guys for every issue then you may not get the best expert. Most experts have "issues" that they really are experts on. And other issues they just know. I wouldn't expect one person to know every issue inside out.
This is one reason I prefer the PF and APS.

That's why having a great reference collection is so important.

"I do not believe either outfit is helping the hobby in any way"

Climber. please explain. That sounds like a blanket statement. If what you really mean is grading, that is a different question. If you really mean in any way, how does providing identification, noting faults and alterations fail to provide any help to the hobby?

"Ideally, certification organizations would publish their 'track record' so consumers would be better able to make an informed purchasing decision. It would be best to break down the 'track record' by 'area' (i.e. country, era, catalog section, etc.). I assume that this kind of analysis would also benefit the organization, revealing which areas were the strongest and which areas could use some improvement. "

Don - what do you mean by track record? How many of a particular item or area they have cert'ed might be interesting, but the real question is their accuracy and getting that info is problematic.

Ignoring the grading, I think it comes down to accuracy. I feel we have all had stamps come back not as expected, than sent it elsewhere and received a certification.

If I send a stamp to X, Y and Z, if X says not genuine, but Y and Z certify as genuine, who is right? Accuracy, in my mind, would be how many stamps are accepted/rejected but have opposite results elsewhere.

That's my take on the op's question.

Agreed that there is no clean method for dealing with 'disputed' certifications (certs issued between different organizations). No need to go there.

But there is no difficulty in calculating the number of certifications that their own organization has overturned. And there is absolutely no 'shame' in doing this; any organization should be interested in the quality of their service. Obviously things like technology and the knowledgebase has improved over the years. And obviously people can make mistakes.

'Continuous improvement' is an important part of any company. Quality Control and Quality Assurance do not exist to 'catch' employees or to be beat up a company. They exist because it is important understand what areas are being done well and what areas can be improved. This discovery not only includes basic metrics but also things like audit results and customer feedback (surveys) results.

And 'corrective actions' also plays a critical role in the quality process. This means that when a mistake is discovered, the error is fixed and documented. So publishing data where an incorrect cert is identified, it is important that the error and update is documented. (There are cases where a certification organization acknowledged a mistaken certification, agreed to and committed to update their database, yet never did after repeated requests over 5 years.)

Certs are paid third party opinions. This is not rocket science; there is value in transparency and there is value in Quality processes. But I doubt that anything will ever change, hobbyists are fine as long as they get a piece of paper in their favor.
Don

The field of expertizing is a closed world without transparency. Many of the "players" thrive by not disclosing anything, and information is thus not shared.
There is no "standardised" way of conducting expertizing, so it is hard to compare. In many ways this area of philately is stuck in the last century. In the end what they sell are their subjective opinions. When you add money and personas to mix, things only gets worse!

Actually you just have to do a little research in the Siegel database (I made some keyword searches). For all those over 7000 results for stamps sold for more than 10.000 USD I found very few stamps that:
- do not have a PF certificate, but only a PSE certificate
- and: are not that expensive only because of grading

So grading is the most important factor for expensive stamps being sent to PSE. Most other expensive (rare) stamps have an PF certificate.

Sometimes you find even stamps with new PF certificates that had additionally a PSE certificate, just for the grading.

The other thing is if the experts are inhouse or not. If a stamp has no invoice history and no old certificate, I would prefer if the stamp is not sent over and over through the US without any insurance (which is not possible for a stamp not yet certified). So if the PF would have many experts being in NY that would be the perfect world.

I don't believe what is written in catalogues or handbooks. They often just copy what was written by their predescessors.

I am an expert on many modern fields as far as printing methods and stamp paper goes. When I have found certain gross mistakes written I publish these findings and make sure that all my steps - why and how - can be visualized and followed by any other stamp collector who is willing to do the same what I did! I.e. full transparancy as I am not dependent on income from my expertize.

Just because Siegel lists or does not list a stamp as having a cert is meaningless in determining actual populations. It only speaks to Siegel's listing practices and what they feel is important to increase sales. And in addition to Siegel's listing practices, there is also no guarantee that stamp owners have not thrown away some certs or that Siegel otherwise has the complete certification history of a stamp.
Don

I think we agree that the Siegel database is a very good source for statistics about sold stamps.

In addition, both points you make support my post, as if certicates were thrown away or not mentioned by Siegel, the result would be even more obvious, as probably not the new PSE certificate but the old PF certificate would be missing.

But after all I just wanted to add an interesting result from the Siegel sales. I would also recommend this for a certain stamp, if somebody is thinking about getting a certification. For me it would help to look first which kind of certificate this specific stamp had in the sales of the last few years.

I really do appreciate the fact that I can go online and look up the stamps that have been certified by the Philatelic Foundation (PF), Professional Stamp Experts (PSE), American Philatelic Expertizing Service (APEX), etc. with a search engine on their websites. This is very helpful for those who are trying to look up information on some specific stamps for research purposes. Other expertizing services do not allow such information to be looked up through certificate number since they do not share anything and they keep it private. Thus, no information on the stamp is forthcoming. For this situation, it is when the stamp and certificate happen to both be found in an auction that it is usually the time when it can be seen.