Issued by: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

Issue Date: February 23, 2016

Program Area: CSR Reconciliation (CSR)

Question: Does CMS require issuers to include blank conditional or optional fields in the pipe-delimited CSR data files issuers to submit to CMS to maintain proper file length?

Answer: Due to the pipe delimited nature of the data file, when the issuer is not populating optional or conditionally required fields, the issuer should still include the preceding and following pipe delimiters. The issuer may include a space in between the pipe delimiters, but the space is not required.

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