Following up on this...
Going through PERS is the way to do it. Reading the instruction helped, as it spells out specific allowable reasons. I had nothing to lose so submitted mine with a reason that was true, but I wasn't sure it would fly. Turns out it did. Turnaround was a couple of weeks, but it came through. Don't count on the person responding always being the same person.
This may come as a shock to some, but the TAP description of this process was severely lacking and it's not as easy as they said it would be because of needing the set types of justification. But the process did work.