A call for help from the wise monks.I have made an assimilation of the subroutine I am tring to write as little program below, along with its output. I have tried many ways to get into the array embeded in the data structure but am probably missing something very simple. 
use strict;
use XML::Simple;
use Data::Dumper;
    
    my ($user, $service) = ('Scarborough','dbjobs');
    my $user_hash;
    #the real input comes from a file and is very much longer
    $user_hash = XMLin("<SERVICES>
                          <SERVICE name='dbjobs'>
                               <USER>Scarborough</USER>
                               <USER>Whitby</USER>
                          </SERVICE>
                          <SERVICE name='reports'>
                   <USER>Scarborough</USER>
                          </SERVICE>
                        </SERVICES>");
    
    print Dumper($user_hash); #only here for testing
    
    if ($$user_hash{SERVICE}->{$service}){
        print "$service exists\n";
        
        #Here the problem begins 
        #Why is @users getting a ref to the array 
        my @users = @$user_hash{SERVICE}->{$service}->{USER};
        print Dumper(@users);
        #have tried: foreach my $this_service (@$user_hash{SERVICE}->{
+$service}->{USER})
        foreach my $this_user (@users){
            print "\n".$this_user."   ".$user."\n";
            
        }
    }
    
__END__    
  
OUTPUT FROM PROGRAM
$VAR1 = {
          'SERVICE' => {
                       'dbjobs' => {
                                   'USER' => [
                                             'Scarborough',
                                             'Whitby'
                                           ]
                                 },
                       'reports' => {
                                    'USER' => 'Scarborough'
                                  }
                     }
        };
dbjobs exists
$VAR1 = [
          'Scarborough',
          'Whitby'
        ];

ARRAY(0x1a79ea8)   Scarborough

[download]
Thank you for your consideration.

In reply to Derefferencing the out put from XMLin() by Scarborough

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