The SCDA trip

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Posted By: Aaron

"This forum should be proud that they helped foster change in the hobby regarding disclosure of ownership of authenticated items."

What change?

Setting aside the streak bat, this much is known:

SCDA and its individual authenticators long practiced self-authentication of items they owned, which were then consigned to auction houses without the conflict of interest being disclosed to potential bidders.

This was publicly revealed last month.

After this was revealed, SCDA responded by instituting a policy whereby AFTER the winning bidder has won and received his item a box will be "checked" to indicate SCDA or one of its authenticators owned the item. The winning bidder then has thirty days to prove the item is NOT authentic (and he or she has to not only prove a negative but also pay for the costs associated with evaluating the item again and then run the risk of Mastro/SCDA not accepting his contrary findings).

SCDA's individual authenticators still refuse to stop their practice of authenticating items they sell.

Auction houses (namely Mastro) still refuse to identify an item as having been self-authentivcated by the consignor in the item description so that potential bidders can be made aware of the conflict of interest PRIOR to bidding (when it matters most as this is when the bidder makes his decision of whether to bid or not and how much to bid).

SCDA still refuses to withhold authentication services from auction houses who won't disclose their conflict of interest beforehand.

SCDA still refuses to withhold consignments from auction houses who won't disclose their conflict of interest beforehand.

I have asked SCDA to institute these policies both in this forum and via private e-mail. So far to no avail. So a system is still in place where a bidder purchases an item only to find out after the fact that the item's LOA was obtained from the consignor himself. I suspose this is better than not knowing at all, but to me this still falls far short of adequaltely addressing the problem, since the conflict of interest remains undisclosed when bids occur.

If these discrepancies change, then yes, we can say we have affected change. Otherwise, I believe they have simply taken the path of least resistance that is least threatening to the current auction system and their financial interest in it.