Metro 2 Consumer Information Indicators (Field 33)

The Consumer Information Indicator (CII) is the field that says something about the CONSUMER rather than about the account. Bankruptcy, personal receivership, reaffirmation of a debt, assumption of a lease, and the grantor's inability to locate the consumer all live here. Everything else on the record keeps doing its own job underneath: Account Status still describes how the account is performing, Current Balance still carries what is owed, and the Payment History Profile still carries the month-by-month history.

The purging column is the reason this field matters more than its two bytes suggest. A bankruptcy CII freezes the Date of First Delinquency and the account carries the bankruptcy indicator for up to ten years, which is longer than the seven-year clock that ordinarily runs on delinquency from the DOFD. That interaction is also where the most damaging error in this set lives: once a bankruptcy CII is on the tradeline, the DOFD must never be moved. Re-aging a DOFD to restart the purge clock is an accuracy failure regardless of whether it was deliberate, and a bankruptcy CII makes it easy to spot because the two dates stop telling a consistent story.

Because the CII describes a consumer, it rides with the consumer and not with the tradeline. The Base Segment CII speaks for the primary consumer on the account. The J1 and J2 Associated Consumer segments each carry their own CII for the consumer they name. On a joint account where one spouse filed and the other did not, the bankruptcy CII belongs on whichever segment names the filer, and the other consumer's segment stays blank. Copying a bankruptcy indicator across every consumer on a joint account, or dropping the associated consumer's segment entirely and letting the Base Segment carry the condition for everybody, misreports someone who never filed.

Do not confuse this field with the Compliance Condition Code. They sit next to each other in the Base Segment and both look like compliance flags, but the CCC carries dispute states and consumer-requested closure for one reporting cycle, while the CII carries bankruptcy, receivership, reaffirmation, lease assumption, and locate conditions for the consumer. They are populated independently, and neither one clears the other. Note also that four codes were retired: W, X and Y (legacy reaffirmation) and Z (deceased) must not be reported after April 2021, so any mapping table still emitting them needs updating before the file goes out.