How to store special characters in XDB so that they don't later throw ORA-31061 when queried?

How to store special characters in XDB so that they don't later throw
ORA-31061 when queried?

We have two different third party applications integrated with our Oracle
EBS. One of them we have had for a long time and it has had no trouble
querying Oracle character data that contains an '&' character. Since we
began creating some of this data from the other third party tool, by way
of Oracle APIs, data that was created by the API that contains an '&'
character now throws an error when queried by the original outside tool.
The error is: "ORA-31061: XDB error: special char to escaped char
conversion failed." I looked up the error and quickly identified the
offending data - an '&' character in a name field. Removing the offending
data solved the error. But I also learned that we have thousands of
records with an '&' in the same column that does not throw this error when
queried by the outside connection. ONLY data that contains an '&' created
via the API throws the error. Data created within Oracle EBS forms and OA
framework pages and contains the '&' does not throw the ORA-31061 error.
Our users need the character string to contain the '&' because it is a
longtime naming standard. My question is: Can I do something to this
character string before it gets to the API so that it will be stored in
such a way as to not throw the ORA-31061 error when it is queried later by
the outside connection? Oracle EBS must be doing this, otherwise we'd get
the ORA-30161 error each time we query data with an '&' character that was
created within the App.