First, did you use the IDE to record a session that selects the item from the unordered list? If so, does replaying yield the same results? If not - you should start there.

Second, you say "... trouble verifying data in.." which leads me to believe you are not using the select() method but perhaps the get_select_options() method. It is hard to trouble shoot without knowing which method you are using and how are you using it (example)?

Third, If there is truly some reason WWW::Selenium doesn't have a method you need, you have a number of options. You could use one of the myriad of HTML parsing modules on CPAN and parse it yourself. You could subclass it and fix which ever method is broken.