As of now the forms have some mandatory fields that need to be filled out at all times. However, these required fields can prevent deactivation and merging, as they need to be filled out before deactivation is done. This behavior results in unnecessary data entry, which can lead to having dummy data in the system because the users were forced to enter something in order to deactivate a record. One can argue that this is not desired as having dummy data in a production environment can be confusing and also leads to frustration and extra work from the users.

This behavior today can only be corrected by custom solutions and scripts, but I would like something that gives an out of the box solution to this.