Basically what you claim to be doing shouldn't produce this error. You'd be getting this error if you were calling

Green::updateRec(%A­RGS)
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(no backslash in front of $ARGS). So a few possibilities:

• are you calline Green::updateRec in two different places? (the one you've shown us is correct, but the other is wrong, and you're confusing the error messages?)
• is this "code" maybe being written into a string which will get eval'd later on? If so, could this be an interpolated string, such that "\%ARGS" is interpolated as "%ARGS" (the backslash merely escaping the percent)?

One thing I can tell is that you are clearly either passing %ARGS as a hash (not a reference) or you are doing something between the

sub updateRec {
   $new = shift @_;
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somewhere along the lines of

 $new  = (%$new);
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Or, in other words: loading $new with one of the keys in the hash %$new. It'd be a lot easier to make this mistake in your parameter passing, though... so I'd look there first.

One other question: are you really not using strict?

sub updateRec {
   my $new = shift @_;
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