A system and method for transmitting and receiving acknowledgement information are provided. A method for communications device operations includes determining a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) response for each CC in a set of configured CCs, thereby producing a set of HARQ responses, generating an information vector from the set of HARQ responses, encoding the information vector, and transmitting the encoded information vector. A sub-vector of one or more bits selected from the information vector is assigned a fixed vector value independent of HARQ responses for CCs not in a set of CCs when the set of CCs is not empty, where the set of CCs comprises at least one CC whose HARQ response is equal to DTX.