Yes, the new system is definitely treating the indexed file as corrupt. I just tested copying the tarball back to the source system and untarring it. I pointed the application to this copy of the file it and it worked without a hitch.
So I'm thinking the problem is more with the indexed file is simply incompatible with the new system.
The difference is one system is running Liant's RM/COBOL v6.61 for SCO UnixWare 7 and the new system is Visual COBOL v2.2 for Eclipse on SUSE Linux. I wonder if there is a difference in how indexed files are organized between the two, and files aren't directly compatible between the two.