Error releasing project with POM encoded in UTF-8 with BOM

I have a Visual Studio project, when I do perform release in Continuum it results in: Release Error Unable to get release plugin parameters and process project - only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not \uef (position: START_DOCUMENT seen \uef... @1:1). The error doesn't indicate which file Continuum is having a problem processing. After some time spent investigating the files, I noticed the BOM character was in the POM causing the error in release. Additionally,I was able to successfully run 'mvn release:prepare -DdryRun=true -DautoVersionSubmodules=true' at the command line.