DMS Script PeopleTools 8.54 behaves differently with Oracle Date format of 'DD-MON-YYYY'. Is there

We have several datamover scripts that we run annually where we select values from the PS_PAY_CALENDAR and we have criteria such as 'And pay_end_dt > '27-DEC-2015', for example.  This same script that we have been running for years in PeopleTools 8.49 no longer works with this date format.  This same query does work in Oracle SQL Plus and SQL Developer in our current database instance.

When the DMS script is modified to change the date using To_Char function, it works fine.  I was just wondering if there is a setting somewhere that controls the date format, or if PeopleTools just changed somewhere along the line to not recognize the 'dd-mon-yyyy' format in Datamover.