How to Remove Employees in Compliance with GDPR but Have Error Message about direct reports

We have quite a few removals to do because of GDPR. 7 year deadline for keeping these records have passed.

However when trying to do that some are failing because they have had direct reports in the past = "You can't cancel this work relationship because the person had, has, or will have direct reports. You need to assign the reports to other managers first."

We can go into the person record with a historic date but we have since made fields mandatory which we can submit the changes as it needs the information.

This process works in test as I am able to add in fake data to the mandatory fields