Merging Contacts Created By Partners

Summary:

Hello everyone. Hope the community can help us with a CDM merging topic. We have both internal employees and Partners utilizing CRM together. Employees have full access to all Customer/Contact data and our Partner reps are geographically restricted to a subset of those Accounts/Contacts. We're trying to cleanup Customer/Contact duplicates but we keep running into the same error.

After a couple tickets we finally nailed down the root cause to a out-of-box merge rule that, I don't think, we can disable. The error message is:

"The merge request can't be processed because customer contacts are owned by different resource organizations."