Ugh. If it didn't have two formats in one, I'd say to use whatever import mechanism your database has. (MySQL has LOAD DATA INFILE, Oracle has several different tools, etc.)

What you're looking for is something like:

while (<FILE>)
{
    chomp;
    my @data = split /\t/;

    # Do something with the line.
}
[download]

Alternatively, you could pass the file to Text::xSV, which will do the parsing for you and hand you a line. You'll still have to keep track of whether you're dealing with a main line or an award history line, but you'd have to do that no matter what. (If you didn't, you wouldn't use Perl to solve the problem - you'd use an RDBMS tool.)