I was wrong...there was in fact a script being applied to the field in order to calculate the price of the item. The formatting was hard coded into the script. I updated the format to "c" in the script which is the standard format for currency and it works fine now. I will paste the line below in case others find it helpful. Sorry for any confusion.
Replaced:
xrItemPrice.Text = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Format(xrItemAmount.Text / xrItemQuantity.Text,"$#,##0.00###")
With
xrItemPrice.Text = Microsoft.VisualBasic.Format(xrItemAmount.Text / xrItemQuantity.Text,"c")