Active Directory Employee ID question (programmers welcome)

Ok so quick scenerio, we have a company that goes through employee's like (insert pun here). Anywhere from 10-50 employee's a month depending on the month. Our Development department creating a program/script that allows our HR department to enter a person's name into it, and it creates all the accounts this person will need (Including there AD windows logon). The problem is any name that is entered greater than 11 characters fails to create (we have a system in place if the account name is >= 11 characters to shoot IT an email so we can create that account normally). Our Development team who built this software off of someone else's software believes this has somethign to do with the limitations of characters in the Employee ID Field.

Can anyone tell me what the character limitations on the Employee ID Field is so that I can let them know if they are correct, or if they are not. And if anyone else can think of an easier for effective way to give the HR department the ability to create new users in AD via an end user software (perferably free) that would be great too!