We have a dispute between 2 compliance checkers regarding 837I Section B.1.1.3.1.4 String which states "Trailing spaces must be suppressed unless they are necessary to satisfy a minimum length." Our State Government Program vendor is rejecting our 837 for having empty characters at the end of element 01 in an N3 segment (prior to the segment terminator) which our compliance map did not reject. When we submitted this issue to our compliance vendor their response was that they did not reject the claim because it was a TAB character at the end of the element not spaces. Should this reject regardless if there are spaces or a tab at the end of the element? Thank you
The constraint for string data elements related to trailing spaces is not the issue in the stated scenario. Guide section B.1.1.3.1.4 (String) states "A string data element is a sequence of any characters from the basic or extended character sets." These character sets are identified explicitly in section B.1.1.2.2 (Basic Character Set) and B.1.1.2.3 (Extended Character Set).
X12.6 - Application Control Structure states in section 3.3 (Character Set) "All data element values, except those of the binary data element, shall be constructed using the character set specified in 3.3.1 through 3.3.3." These sections include the basic character set, the extended character set and the empty character set.
The TAB character is not part of the allowed character sets as defined by x12.6 ( Section 3.3) and is not an permitted as non binary element content.