Advice Sought On Expertizing Matter

It is common, but not uniformly the case.

For Dutch stamps, there is Henk Vleeming, but also the NVPH (that publishes the catalogue) commission. In the past, there were other individuals.

In Spain, Roig (backstamping stamps) and Graus were individuals. Presently, certificates are issued by COMEX or CEM. There, commission-issued certificates have become the standard.

The UK, for along time, had the commissions with a few individuals (Brandon, Hendon) issuing certificates that not everyone takes seriously.

Germany has a system of individuals issuing certificates. The drawback is that many older certificates have been classified as fraudulent as some individuals were expertising their own inventions. Still, I am not really seeing much change towards a commission in Germany. There are experts for many foreign countries that issue their certificates under the AIEP banner. Vleeming is a strange one, as he is Dutch and accepted in the Dutch market, even if the certificate is German. Ireland is very much accepted as the expert was an Irishman with a shop in Germany. However, you will have a hard time making a BPP certificate work for you in Spain or in the UK, even if it is on AIEP paper.

As far as I know, the PF has never publicly revealed who expertizers on an item are. PSE went through multiple phases where they listed the names of expertizers on the cert, in the 1980s and then again in the early to mid 2000s. I don't know whether it was continuous over that period.

None of my PSAG certs have expert's names listed, if memory serves.

While APEX certs do not list the names of the experts, if you call or email and are an APS member, they will tell you who the experts were.

Single-expert certs, e.g., Weiss, Crowe, Sismondo are self-explanatory.

I know that items sent to the PF are always looked at by multiple people, usually at least three, and sometimes more.

If the expertizer notes of Piller and Champagne had originally been made available we may have better understood how they arrived at their conclusion and we would have been spared a 9 page thread.

Which only yesterday was at least 11 pages. What happened to our long-time (11 days) member? The one with a total of 2 years experience collecting stamps (per his own description)?

If the stamp was done at a show, there probably would not have been much in the way of notes. Only "genuine". Few notes were written on worksheets for certs back then unless they were absolutely necessary. Much information considered essential today was not even mentioned in those days on any certs.

I understand not wanting to be swamped by an irate customer who's pissed that his 65 isn't a 64 or something. But... I don't know, that's business? Goes with the territory, I suppose. There will always be some vocal bad apples, but I'm sure the vast majority whose patients receive "bad news" won't start flooding email inboxes and tying up phone lines.

revcollector, I'll respectfully disagree re your rationale to not divulge the identity of experts - namely,


I'm at a loss to figure out how these are sufficient to warrant this lack of transparency. (And no, I don't mean transparency around the overall process of expertizing, but rather the 'show your work' notes behind a verdict.). Unless experts are getting threats or harassing emails all the time? As for the bribery possibility, there are (or were) plenty of single experts working out there: surely if this was a widespread issue, we'd know by now? And if someone's sufficiently motivated to try to sway an expert opinion, they'll figure out how to find someone who's willing to play ball, presumably.

Do you really think that seeing "matches the 123 reference example exactly" is going to add to your life? That's the most it's going to say. It might only say "not 112b-123", and the specific condition. I can't imagine what 98% of the notes would say that would actually make a difference. The only time that notes on individual stamps really matter is when they have very specific problems. Where a fault is, or where a difficult to see watermark is. And the faults are mentioned on the certificate anyway. Or why a cancel is fake. As I have said before, the vast majority of items sent in for certificates are stamps that have been seen hundreds of times before, and do not require extensive notes to expertise.

Well, sure, why not? Let that be the stated reason of record and everyone can move on. You'll admit, it does add a bit more context - absent that, the buyer (or their spouse, heirs, etc.) could be at a loss to explain why an expert made the decision they did.



Perhaps, but let's not you or I be the one who comes up with that percentage. Even if it is 98%, it could make a big difference the 2% of times, no?



And if my patient were one of these stamps, would I be able to 1) get these notes, and 2) know who examined the patient? If we're dealing with the PF et al, apparently not, and I find that kind of crazy.

Obviously the notes are considered proprietary. Businesses do that every day. Even non profits.

So it's not irate customers, bribery, or lack of information, but rather just top secret info? I could see that if doing so confers a competitive advantage, or, put differently, if your business would be harmed by that info being out in the open.

I just don't see it here. JF Brun, the French expert, made a comment once that the working as a guard at the Louvre doesn't make one an art expert. So what would happen here if an expert shared their notes? Even if I found them and set up my own business, it'd hardly be a success. A cert issued from someone with no reputation wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on, even if the information is all correct.

It's about who's behind the opinion and their reputation for a cert to have real validity, not just the facts. Indeed, from a business perspective the facts are a means to that end (reputation).

I'll stop opining on this for now, but I still am at a loss to understand why we can't have more notes made readily available to us. After all, as has been pointed out, we are paying for that work, not just a decision.

You would have to ask the person in charge there to find out.

While it's fine for you to disagree with it, the fact remains that it was not your decision to make. Someone else made it, and it is what it is. You can ask about it of course.

And actually you are paying for an opinion. You are not paying for the brains which made that opinion. Apparently that's how they see it.

So after reading page after page of folks sparring with each other over minutia, there still is the issue of what do we pay the so-called experts for; which seems to have been lost in the arguments.

Two agencies have a different opinion; the owner of the stamp is in limbo, and one of said agencies is wrong. (Of course, one is correct and one wrong; obviously there are only two stamps that can fit the opinions here but that is of no help to either potential buyer or seller.)

Why are they considered experts if two agencies cannot arrive at the same conclusion? I might as well call something a Scott C3A and list it for whatever and call myself an "expert" and take someone's money and move on. No repercussions, no need to provide a basis for my opinion. Sounds like a pretty good gig!

No, I do not think said agencies do not make a good faith effort; but I do think they need to talk, but they won't because when someone is wrong which in this case one of them is here then the whole mess will start crumbling when people have to acknowledge that some certs are wrong and people lose real money.

It's difficult to talk to people who made a decision 30 years ago and have passed on in the meantime. And I suspect that the original poster is not in limbo at this point. I am sure that he got at least one more opinion, and possibly more. So I suspect that he knows what stamp he has by now.