Two people sharing a name in the same city is the ordinary case, not the awkward exception. Add nicknames, transliterations between alphabets, married names never formally registered, and shortened forms used inconsistently, and a single human being can turn into three faint sketches across three sources. Person confusion is the most expensive failure mode in this work, and the reason is simple: a report that confidently attaches nine findings to the wrong person leaves the building once before it stops leaving at all.
Two people with the same name in the same city is the standard case, not the exception. Common names compound it; so do nicknames, transliterations between alphabets, married names not formally registered, and shortened forms used inconsistently across sources. A person can be one person in a registry, a slightly different person in a press article, and a third spelling in a court file.
We resolve by anchoring on the most stable fields available. Date of birth where we have it; national identifier where the project supports it. Address history with cross-checked overlap; roles that begin or end on the same date across different companies. Phone numbers across years; then we score the candidate set. Anything below a threshold either gets dropped with a note or escalated to direct verification.
The expensive lesson of the first quarter was that disambiguation cost is non-linear. Easy cases are cheap; hard cases are very expensive and the cost is mostly human review. We adjusted pricing to reflect this. Projects that look small on paper can carry weeks of resolution work if the person is a common name in a busy country, and we say so before contracting.
Clients are usually fine with the cost once it is explained. What they are not fine with is paying for a report that confidently attached findings to the wrong person and learning about it later. So that report does not leave the building.