VLOOKUP - isn't working??

Most of your data has a varying amount of leading and trailing spaces.
This is causing the function to fail because the various sheets differ in the amount of spaces any one code has.

There are also 872 duplicates in your lookup table "universe" your lookup will return the first found in each case so your data will be compromised.

The only way to go is to clean out all your data that consists of a code in all sheets,
Use e.g. Trim(A1) in a spare column, then Paste Special > Values over the code column

Once you have checked for duplicates all should be straight forward.

I have trimmed "universe", "IWW", & "IWV" in the attached.

Hope this helps