OE Header Taxauth field

Our AR dept wants to be able to compare the tax jurisdictions on the OE header record to the jurisdictions loaded on the Customer and Ship-to master records. The oeeh.taxauth field is an array of the various tax jurisdictions for each order which looks like this (US,State,County,City,Other1,Other2).
It is possible to split an array of numbers in the Phocas query by using this syntax “,oeeh.taxamt[1] AS StateTaxAmt” but that syntax does not work for an array of character strings. Gives the error message “Inconsistent Types (7481)”.
Has anyone run into this and how did you overcome it?
Please let me know.
Thanks!
Ted