PEP lists are snapshots of decisions other people have made, on their own schedule, with their own tolerance for error. They are useful the way a phone book is useful, and misused the way a phone book is misused: as a substitute for actually knowing who is on the other end of the line. A tier you can stand behind is the answer this question deserves; a list is where the question starts.
Most of the useful work sits in the layer underneath that flag. A serious system reads things like how current a role is, whether the surrounding network is still active or has drifted, whether the public footprint matches the headline. It is software work and research work at the same time, and a lot of it is just getting the inputs to talk to each other in a useful order.
Family and staff is where the time goes; the subject themselves is usually the easy part. The people around them, in different countries, in different languages, sometimes in industries that look unrelated, are where the read actually sits. That is the part the off-the-shelf flag cannot do, and it is one of the reasons the standard product falls short here.
Where model work comes in is mostly in the cross-reference. Reading a thousand small signals at once and asking whether they line up with what the public version of someone says about themselves. That is not magic; it is just a lot of careful joining, done at a pace no analyst can hold by hand.
a flag is the start of the question. A tier you can stand behind is the answer, and that answer comes out of the system, not the list.