Incident memo: ticket 4471, vendor onboarding agent.

On 3 November an onboarding agent approved a supplier after screening. The context handed to the agent had been assembled from four sources: the supplier registration form, the sanctions screening result, two emails from the procurement officer, and a summary of the earlier correspondence. The registration form listed a trading address in Dubai. The screening result was clear. The summary, written eleven days earlier, described the beneficial owner as a resident of Cyprus; the screening record, refreshed the previous night, placed him in a jurisdiction under review. The agent approved. The reviewer who signed off an hour later had the same summary in front of her and no way to tell when it had been produced.

The failure was not in the screening service, which returned a correct and current result. It was in the assembly step: the summary was dense, accurate when written, and stale at the moment of use. Nothing in the record distinguished the two. The approval was reversed the following morning by a manual review, before any payment was released, and no loss resulted. The timeline below is reconstructed from the message queue.

Timeline. 08:12 the screening refresh completes. 08:14 the assembly job builds context and compresses each source. 08:14 to 08:16 the agent reads 1,842 tokens and returns an approval. 09:31 the human reviewer signs. 10:05 a second screening refresh lands. Next morning, a compliance analyst reads the refreshed record and reverses the decision.

What the evidence showed. The summary was the only source mentioning the beneficial owner's residence, and it was the oldest. The compressed version of the refresh arrived after the summary in the context window; the agent weighted the earlier statement, which was more specific. The assembly job kept no copy of the assembled context and wrote a ratio and a duration to its log. The reviewer asked for the text the agent had seen; it no longer existed.

Recommendations. First, every assembled context must carry the vintage of each source and must not be compressed into a single undifferentiated block. Second, the last compression before an irreversible action must produce a record that a third party can check. Third, the reviewer must see the same bytes the agent saw, not a summary of them.