Your code snippet is too short. I appreciate your desire to be brief, but we're missing some criticial bits, chief of which is the contents of the clean_hash subroutine.

If I had to rely on intuition, though, I'd bet you were redeclaring your hash in clean_hash. This isn't a good or bad thing, entirely, because you should delete this call altogether, and replace it with the %hash=() that people have advised it'll get rid of your scoping error altogether. Wrapping such a trivial line of code in a sub makes baby Jesus cry.