Issue with ORC merge when Duplicate phone type not allowed implemented using autocomplete rule

Summary:

The original requirement was to add a validation rule that would prevent a person from having more than one of a particular phone type. This is Use Case 16 for Guidewell Mutual project. This requirement was implemented using the below code. But, now the issue is, when an external candidate in Recruiting applies for a opening and on running the duplicate check, he is found to be an existing person; the user selects the existing person to merge the records; but gets an error due to this autocomplete rule with the same error message used here.

To avoid the issue, I tried adding an additional criteria in the IF clause to say - "and Person_Phone.Number Not equal to rowVar_Phone.Number" but still the same issue.