GMT offset in 5.4

I know this is a rookie question but I’ve lived with it for a long time and want to get to the bottom of it.

Whenever I do a BULKCOPY in my Xlate the date/time fields always come out of the Xlate with a GMT offset even when I sent them into the Xlate as YYYYMMDD.  I’ve been dealing with this by setting the outbound variant to only be 8 characters long but it’s a pain to have to touch every date when I just want the BULKCOPY to leave the dern thing alone and pass it along untouched to the outbound variant.

Why is the Xlate doing this and how do I get around it?  I shouldn’t need a DATECOPY for every date in the HL7 message should I?

What finally drove me to the breaking point is we are converting from 3.8.1P to 5.4 and now not only does 5.4 put a GMT offset on all the dates but it also throws in the system time on the date/time field if the time comes into the Xlate blank.