I tend to have this problem as well. Some clients I need to integrate with keep on sending invalid XML ... the data are in ISO-8859-1, but there's no encoding attribute. This is what I use to "fix" the issue. It's not clean, but what can I do :-(

    unless ($strXML =~ m{^\s*<\?xml [^\?]+?encoding\s*=\s*['"]([^'"]*)
+['"][^\?]*\?>} # starts by a <?xml ...?>
        and uc($1) ne 'UTF-8' # and there is something else than UTF-8
    ) {
print LOGFILE "It claims to be UTF-8.\n\n";
        # so it should be UTF-8 yeah? Let's see ...
        if (!decode_utf8($strXML)) {
            print LOGFILE "Hey fix the encoding!!! This aint UTF-8!!!\
+n\n";
            $strXML =~ s{^\s*(<\?xml [^\?]+?encoding\s*=\s*['"])[^'"]*
+(['"][^\?]*\?>)}{$1ISO-8859-1$2}
            or $strXML = qq{<?xml version="1" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>\
+n} . $strXML;
        }
    }
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