Symptoms

In a specific workflow event that was doing a smartobject call based off of some criteria, nothing was getting returned despite the fact that it seemingly should.

 

Diagnoses

The event in question was meant to return a value if and only if two independent values were equivalent. Of these two values being compared, one of them came from a sharepoint list. As it happens that value trailing whitespaces which should not have been. This caused the comparison to fail in all cases as the second half of the comparison would never match the white space.
 

Resolution

By using a trim function we were able to snip of the what spaces and make things work.