scout mine detecting not working properly

me and a buddy were playing a game last night and neither of us could get the scout mine auto detect feature to work.  i generally run up a batch of 10 scouts and use them in a group to take out all the mines once i take over an enemy planet.  they would just sit there and do nothing.  if i brought another ship in range (like a cap) and manually targeted the mines that were within the autodetect range of a scout then i could blow them up but this would not happen automatically like its supposed to.  I was playing TEC-L and he was playing Advent-L and it was the same for both of us.