SEPA Payment Format Validations - Bank Charge Bearer

We are in the process of testing the SEPA payment formats and I was wondering what is the expected behavior for the predefined Bank Charge Bearer valdiation attached to the SEPA Credit transfer payment format?  My understanding was that the bank charge bearer must be specified as "SLEV" on the supplier record under payment details.  During our testing we wanted to verify that the validation was in fact working, so we left several supplier bank charge bearer values blank, however they are still being selected for payment when running the SEPA payment process request.  Is this the expected behavior?  I