Exception taxonomy and the learning loop

There is no upload contract. Any file type is accepted at intake and the failure surfaces three steps later, at which point the requester has moved on.

Validate the file at the point of upload and refuse it there with a specific reason, rather than accepting it and failing silently downstream.

Fewer than 100 occurrences in a rolling 90 days, and no occurrence where the requester was not told at upload time.

The acting threshold is deliberately conservative and has not been revisited since the estate went live. It was set to be defensible rather than to be right.

Recalibrate the threshold per agent class against observed accuracy at each confidence band, rather than holding one figure across the whole estate.

Per-class thresholds published with the accuracy evidence behind each one.

The requester supplies less than the agent needs and the intake form does not ask for it, because asking for it lengthens the form.

A clarifying question returned within the same session rather than a routed exception, for the six request types that produce most of this volume.

Half of these resolved by a clarifying question inside the session rather than by routing to a person.

Long-standing habit reinforced by the fact that emailing a known person still works and is faster for the requester.

Auto-forward from the shared function mailboxes into intake, and a monthly note to the top twenty senders. Nothing is blocked, because blocking the channel pushes the work further underground.

Fewer than 400 occurrences in a rolling 90 days for two consecutive quarters.

The tolerance rule and the pattern check disagree by design. The tolerance was set by policy, the pattern check was learned from history, and nobody has reconciled the two.

Reconcile the pattern check against the published tolerance so the two do not contradict each other, and publish whichever is the binding rule.

A single published matching rule, and fewer than 200 review routings in a rolling 90 days.

No system of record has been declared for the contested attributes. Each system believes it is authoritative.

Declare a system of record per attribute, publish it, and make the agents read only from it.

A published system-of-record register covering every attribute the agents read.

Thresholds are set in absolute currency and were never indexed. Prices moved and the thresholds did not.

Review the twelve highest-volume thresholds against current unit prices, and set a review date on each one rather than leaving them open-ended.

Every threshold in the top twelve carries a review date, and escalation volume from stale thresholds falls below 300 in a rolling 90 days.

Approvals are concentrated on a small number of people, and the platform routes by role without regard to how much is already in that person queue.

Route to the least loaded qualified approver rather than the first one, and escalate on the timeout rather than expiring the case.

No case expires for want of a decision. Timeouts escalate instead of expiring.

Each agent holds its own working context and the handoff passes a case identifier rather than the collected evidence.

Pass the collected evidence with the handoff, and make re-asking a hard failure in the evaluation suite rather than a soft quality note.

The re-ask case in the handoff evaluation suite passes for every agent in the chain, and the count falls below 100.

The reason field is optional, and making it mandatory was rejected once on the grounds that it would slow approvers down.

A short structured reason with four options and a free-text box, mandatory on override only, not on approval.

Over 90 percent of overrides carry a reason, and the reasons are read into the evaluation backlog monthly.

Not established. The class is counted and contained, and nobody has found what causes it.

None written. Every occurrence is solved individually, which is why the count is not falling.

Not defined. No owner has been named to define one.

Two legacy vendor masters were merged in a prior program without a deduplication pass, and new duplicates keep being created because the create screen does not check for near matches.

A near-match check at create time, plus a monthly merge queue worked by the vendor master team.

Fewer than 50 new duplicate pairs in a rolling 90 days and the historical backlog worked to zero.

Refusal prompts were tightened after an early incident and were tightened further than the mandate requires.

A refusal case set in every evaluation suite that fails the agent for refusing inside its mandate, not only for acting outside it.

Under 100 in a rolling 90 days with the refusal case set passing across the pilot.

Policy variants were loaded for the markets with the most volume. The long tail was deferred and never revisited.

Load the variants for the next fifteen entities by volume, and make the global default refuse rather than proceed where the local rule is unknown.

No case proceeds on a global default where a local rule exists but is unloaded.

Agents run on a clock rather than on a data-ready signal, because two of the upstream feeds do not emit one.

Run on a data-ready signal where the feed emits one, and hold rather than proceed where it does not.

No agent produces a result against an incomplete feed for two consecutive closes.

Escalation targets are held as names in the agent configuration rather than as roles resolved against the directory at the moment of escalation.

Resolve escalation targets against the directory at escalation time, and fall back to the role owner one level up when the seat is vacant.

Zero escalations landing on a vacant seat over a full quarter.

Not established. The class is counted and contained, and nobody has found what causes it.

None written. Every occurrence is solved individually, which is why the count is not falling.

Not defined.

Not established. The class is counted and contained, and nobody has found what causes it.

None written. Every occurrence is solved individually, which is why the count is not falling.

A drift flag is either explained by a known upstream change or it triggers a re-evaluation, with no flag sitting unexplained for more than fourteen days.