Thanks, this pointed me in the right direction. For clarification the issue is that doing a lookup in a collection doesn't want to lookup on data outside that collection. I had to add a field and use formula ( =EmpID ) and then do the lookup. The 'as new rows' checkbox is still grayed out but the data is populating. 

Thanks for the assist :)

To have the "as new rows" all lookup fields have to be outside of the table/collection because forms is using each row's date field here to populate the individual row's lookups (at least i'm assuming the ">Variable" names are referencing the table)