I absoutely will in the future and I apologize for not doing that (sorry Lowell). I work with sensitive data so tried to keep it minimal, but I will...

That's exactly what was wrong, once I add in the [RowID] column I get exactly the result set I want. Thanks for the quick catch on that!

I don't know about obsolete(?) quotation marks, but simply not enough...I neglected to double up the quotes in either COASLESCE function, and now that I have it's working.

'SELECT emp_id, emp_name...

Good eyes magoo!! Unfortunately that was just a typo on my part and there is no space in the stored proc, sorry about that.

'SELECT emp_id, emp_name + COALESCE(NULLIF(''('' + COALESCE(CAST(emp_number...