A vendor-onboarding extractor retries up to five times when tax_id is missing. These retries almost never succeed, and recent logs show later attempts returning tax IDs that don't exist. The tax ID is recorded on a separate registration form that isn't sent with the request. What should the team do?

Answer: C — Stop retrying it: make tax_id nullable, flag it, and take it from the form

Retries can't succeed when the information is absent from the provided document; they only increase pressure to fabricate, which is what the invented IDs show. Make the field nullable, flag the gap, and get the value from its real source. More retries (a) or insisting the value is there (b) make fabrication worse. Prompted JSON (d) gives up schema reliability and doesn't supply the missing data.