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 component carrier (CC) in a set of CCs configured by higher layer signaling, 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. The information vector comprises one or more bits respectively corresponding to a CC in the set of CCs. A bit is assigned a fixed value if HARQ response of a corresponding CC is set to DTX in response to no transmission detected over the CC.