For sanctions entries (e.g., from UN, OFAC, EU, etc.), the records often include useful secondary identifiers such as date of birth (DOB), place of birth, nationality, gender, passport/ID numbers, aliases, and addresses — which significantly help reduce false positives during name-based matching.
For PEP entries, however, these secondary identifiers (especially DOB and official ID/passport/tax numbers) are frequently missing or incomplete in the dataset.
Is this a known limitation of OpenSanctions’ PEP data coverage (e.g., due to the nature of public PEP sources, which are often official government announcements or registries that rarely publish DOB/ID details publicly)?
Or is there a way to improve/enrich the PEP data quality when using the OpenSanctions API?
First of all, thanks for using the forum to raise these questions!
Yes, this is a known limitation of our PEP data coverage and indeed caused by the nature of the data sources.
To answer your questions specifically:
Yes, sanctions lists are published for screening purposes, so they often include DOB, passport numbers etc. by design. PEP sources are usually published for transparency, not identity resolution. Most will give you a name and position, but not much more.
We are actively working on closing this gap through our EveryPolitician project. In the near future, our PoliLoom tool will make it much easier to systematically add and verify biographical details for public officeholders. In the meantime, if you’d like to help improve coverage for the countries or positions most relevant to your use case, we’d welcome contributions.
P.S. If you’re interested, you can read about how the Loom is coming along in the development thread.
I’ve just put out a update to Poliloom this week, which allows you to search for politicians, and add sources and information.
Depending on how much data you’d want to enrich, this tool offers a easy way of putting in a quick edit. You can find it here: https://loom.everypolitician.org/