"Misleading" can be confusing

On 17th January, The National Disclosure Authority announced that it had filed a law suit against a company called Property ID.

The National Disclosure Authority abbreviates its name to NDA, and it claims that Property ID has been involved in "anticompetitive activities" and in particular "unfair and unlawful competition, trade libel, misappropriation of trade secrets, conversion, tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, and false advertising of its products, services, and claims regarding PID's insurance coverage."

NDA complains, amongst other things, that Property ID (or PID, as NDA likes to call it) "vigorously resisted any disclosure of its insurance policies."

If this suggests to you that this is a regulatory action, think again for NDA is "an independent hazard disclosure company."

It's a relatively new company and it's led by Sergio Siderman former President and Chief Executive of Property ID. NDA's VP, Sales was previously Director of Sales for PID.

Ryan Hilterbran is NDA's VP Marketing - and he, too, is a former senior employee at PID where he was Director of Marketing.

NDA says that several of PID's senior employees found bad practices at PID, and decided to leave as a result.

On 17 January, NDA issued a statement saying "In early 2007, the majority of PID's management team left the Company when they discovered a number of misrepresentations being made by PID to its clients, including, but not limited to: the discovery that PID was only carrying half the amount of insurance it was advertising; that company owner Carlos Siderman falsely claimed to being an attorney while conducting legal presentations; and that the Company was actually formed in 1994, nearly two decades later than PID advertised. Property I.D. filed lawsuits against many of its former employees who left the company in 2007, in an attempt to harass and intimidate them from joining NDA. Most of PID's lawsuits have already been dismissed."

And NDA claims that its position is supported by a number of other cases: "In the last 24 months, PID has been sued by the U.S. Dept. of Justice for violating anti-kickback statutes (Secretary of U.S. Dept. of Housing v. Property I.D., et al.); by consumers in a Federal Class Action (Berger v. Property I.D.); by Realogy Corp. in a federal case for multiple breaches of contract (Realogy v. Property I.D.); by Coldwell Banker for sending its agents unsolicited reports and invoices (Coldwell Banker v. Property I.D.); by Nutmeg Insurance Company for declaratory relief (Nutmeg v. Property I.D.); and by a real estate agent for PID's inaccurate flood determination on her property (Blasko v. Kirk, et al)."

NDA's website says that they are employee-owned, and in very small print in the page footer, the name of the company is given as "National Disclosure Authority, Inc."

Property ID makes no public comment on the position. But in a glorious sense of irony, its website republishes an article from Forbes magazine which describes abuses in the title insurance market - exactly the kind of abuses that NDA claims PID used - and used when NDA's own officers were running PID.