diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst
index 6923b42d3340b..6534172a41384 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v1.2.0.rst
@@ -318,6 +318,7 @@ I/O
 - :meth:`to_csv` did not support zip compression for binary file object not having a filename (:issue:`35058`)
 - :meth:`to_csv` and :meth:`read_csv` did not honor `compression` and `encoding` for path-like objects that are internally converted to file-like objects (:issue:`35677`, :issue:`26124`, and :issue:`32392`)
 - :meth:`to_picke` and :meth:`read_pickle` did not support compression for file-objects (:issue:`26237`, :issue:`29054`, and :issue:`29570`)
+- Bug in :meth:`read_csv` with `engine='python'` truncating data if multiple items present in first row and first element started with BOM (:issue:`36343`)
 
 Plotting
 ^^^^^^^^
diff --git a/pandas/io/parsers.py b/pandas/io/parsers.py
index 43ffbe6bdd66c..bc622ab8c1f18 100644
--- a/pandas/io/parsers.py
+++ b/pandas/io/parsers.py
@@ -2886,14 +2886,12 @@ def _check_for_bom(self, first_row):
             # quotation mark.
             if len(first_row_bom) > end + 1:
                 new_row += first_row_bom[end + 1 :]
-            return [new_row] + first_row[1:]
 
-        elif len(first_row_bom) > 1:
-            return [first_row_bom[1:]]
         else:
-            # First row is just the BOM, so we
-            # return an empty string.
-            return [""]
+
+            # No quotation so just remove BOM from first element
+            new_row = first_row_bom[1:]
+        return [new_row] + first_row[1:]
 
     def _is_line_empty(self, line):
         """
diff --git a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
index 1d8d5a29686a4..7f53b14ab77a4 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/io/parser/test_common.py
@@ -2128,6 +2128,16 @@ def test_first_row_bom(all_parsers):
     tm.assert_frame_equal(result, expected)
 
 
+def test_first_row_bom_unquoted(all_parsers):
+    # see gh-36343
+    parser = all_parsers
+    data = """\ufeffHead1	Head2	Head3"""
+
+    result = parser.read_csv(StringIO(data), delimiter="\t")
+    expected = DataFrame(columns=["Head1", "Head2", "Head3"])
+    tm.assert_frame_equal(result, expected)
+
+
 def test_integer_precision(all_parsers):
     # Gh 7072
     s = """1,1;0;0;0;1;1;3844;3844;3844;1;1;1;1;1;1;0;0;1;1;0;0,,,4321583677327450765