## TL;DR
A Persona inquiry in needs review for 72 hours is not being reviewed; it is waiting on something that will never arrive on its own. Open the inquiry timeline in Persona and find the step it sits on: a manual review queue nobody owns, a verification waiting on a government or database check that errored, or a workflow step waiting for a webhook your system was supposed to send. Resolve that specific hold, then add an aging report for inquiries older than your SLA so the next stuck case surfaces in hours.

```text
persona inquiry stuck in 'needs review' for 72 hours
```

## Use this when
- Inquiries age past 24 to 72 hours in needs review with no movement.
- Most inquiries complete in minutes, so the stuck ones are outliers.
- A workflow, template, or staffing change happened around when cases started sticking.

## Not for this skill when
- The inquiry is waiting on the user for more documents. Persona shows that as a distinct state; nudge the user instead.
- Your team review queue is simply backlogged and cases move, just slowly. That is staffing, visible in queue metrics.

## Steps
1. Open the stuck inquiry in Persona and read its step by step timeline to find the exact step holding it and any error recorded there. Verify: the holding step and its status are identified.
2. If the hold is a manual review step, check the workflow assignment: which team or user group owns it and whether that assignment still exists after any reorganization. Verify: the step has a live owner who can see the case.
3. If the hold is a verification, check that verification result detail for a source error or timeout and rerun or route it per your Persona workflow options. Verify: the verification reaches a pass, fail, or explicit manual decision.
4. Approve, decline, or request information on the currently stuck inquiries individually so real customers are not held by the investigation. Verify: the aged backlog is cleared with a recorded decision per inquiry.
5. Add a daily aging alert listing inquiries older than your SLA with their holding step, sent to the workflow owner. Verify: a staged aged inquiry appears in the alert.

## Variant phrasings
### persona inquiry pending review too long
Duration phrasing.
### persona verification stuck needs review
State phrasing.
### persona workflow step not completing
Workflow phrasing.

Compatibility: Persona inquiries and workflows on current Persona plans. Step and state names follow the Persona dashboard; API users can read the same timeline via the inquiry and verifications endpoints.

## Why it happens
Persona workflows chain automated verifications and human steps, and a chain is only as live as its least owned link. A review step assigned to a deprecated group, or a verification whose data source returned an error the workflow treats as wait forever, parks the inquiry in a state that looks like diligence from the outside and is actually abandonment.

## Edge cases / pitfalls
- Government database checks can legitimately take longer during source outages. Persona status pages and the verification detail distinguish outage from orphaned.
- Bulk actions on stuck inquiries without reading the hold reason can approve cases that were held for real risk. Clear them one by one.
- Template version changes can strand inquiries started on the old version. Filter the aging report by template version.

## Provenance

Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst_vvxmY0BFX9lHMXhfhzP-nA