Metro 2 Payment History Profile Code E: No Payment History: Account In Dispute

Specification

Code	E
Meaning	No Payment History: Account In Dispute
Field	Payment History Profile (Field 18)
Record	Base Segment
Length / position	24 chars · 112–135
Category	Dispute
CRRG reference	CRRG Base Segment field definition, Payment History Profile

E marks a month that sat inside a dispute. The product runtime treats it as its own severity bucket precisely because it does not belong on the good-to-bad scale at all.
It describes the state of the month, not the outcome of the dispute. Reporting E does not say the consumer was right, and it does not say the consumer was wrong.
E is a payment-history character. The account-level dispute condition is carried separately by the Compliance Condition Code field, and the two are reported independently.
E does NOT erase the months around it. Positions older than the disputed month keep whatever they legitimately carried, and a dispute over one month does not justify overwriting a year of history.
E does NOT stay forever. When the disputed month is resolved and you know what actually happened, the accurate character for that month is the one that describes it, and the account-level dispute condition is cleared through its own field.

1A card issuer receives a written dispute about a specific statement's balance and the month in question is reported as E while the furnisher's own investigation runs.
2A servicer is investigating whether a payment posted in the correct month after a lockbox error, and reports E for the affected month.
3A furnisher is verifying whether a month's delinquency belongs to this consumer at all after an identity-related dispute is raised directly with it.
4A lender is reconciling a month where the consumer says an agreed forbearance should have applied, and reports E until the reconciliation completes.

Report E only for the months genuinely affected by the dispute, not across the whole string.
Correct the underlying data when your investigation shows the reported month was wrong. The character is not a substitute for fixing the record.
When you know what the month actually was, report that character. Leaving E in place after your investigation concludes leaves an inaccurate blank in the history.
Keep the account-level dispute condition in sync in the Compliance Condition Code field. The payment-grid character and the account-level condition are separate obligations and clearing one does not clear the other.

A file can be structurally valid and still be wrong. These are the cross-field conditions Payment History Profile Code E has to satisfy.

Payment Rating does not publish an E value, so an E in position 1 must be reconciled against Account Status rather than against Payment Rating directly.
E in the payment grid is independent of the Compliance Condition Code. An account carrying an open dispute condition at the account level may still report real payment characters for months that are not themselves disputed.
E does not create or cancel a Date of First Delinquency. If the string's other positions carry delinquency characters and the delinquency was never cured, the date is still required.
The no-gaps rule applies: E occupies real positions in the consecutive run, it does not blank them out.
Do not treat E as a severity. It is neither an improvement nor a deterioration relative to the adjacent months, so it cannot be used to satisfy or violate the no-improvement-after-charge-off rule.