Take a deeper look at this. I used INSPECT for my conversion, should also look into TRANSFORM. According to what I’ve read about TRANSFORM…
This statement exists within GnuCOBOL to provide compatibility with COBOL programs written to pre-1985 standards. The TRANSFORM statement was made obsolete in the 1985 standard of COBOL, having been replaced by the CONVERTING clause of the INSPECT statement (see INSPECT). New programs should be coded to use INSPECT CONVERTING rather than TRANSFORM.
Also consider COMP-x data. Perhaps…
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53645_01/artwb/docs12cr2/wbref/CobolConverter.html
https://sourceforge.net/p/gnucobol/discussion/cobol/thread/3935289e14/