12 county fips code
County FIPS Code (IMTQ-CNTY(1))
This is the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) county code for the current quarter, a 3-byte field at locations 693 - 695. This must be in accordance with the standard county numbering system, which most often has values of 001, 003, 005, etc., for counties listed alphabetically by county name. Special county codes are also provided for each state as well, including the following:
- Unordered List Item900 - Multiple-worksite master accounts found in multiple counties (this code cannot be used for singles or worksite sub-units)
- 995 - Statewide, multiple-county locations, or no primary county
- 996 - Foreign location
- 998 - Out of state location
- 999 - Unknown county
This field is verified by the EXPO interface program against the Lookup Table File, which is a compendium of State and national constants and parameters for processing. A similar verification in the State-specific program that produces the initial multi-quarter extract IMT file may be helpful, but not required. If the county code is a two-byte field in your source file, convert to a 3-digit by adding a leading zero for standard counties or by adding a leading nine for the 95 through 99 codes. If the State county code is a compressed version of the original FIPS, collapsing gaps in the '001, 003, etc.,' sequence into a '001, 002, 003, etc.,' sequential integer sequence, the FIPS county code can be determined from the equation-
Occasionally an establishment will move from one county to another. In such cases, the State must determine whether to adjust the county code when such a change occurs or wait until the first calendar quarter of a new year. A mid-year code change needs to be “economic” in nature (meaning that the change occurs quickly (usually within 30 days) and that it is discovered before the quarter’s deliverable is due), rather than on current location accounting. However, this decision is not made by any interface program. Therefore any change to the county code which occurs in a quarter other than the first calendar quarter will normally be assumed non-economic by the IMT system interface program, and will be ignored. This can be overridden, however, by flagging the change as economic through the composite field, IMTQ-ECON-CODE-CHG-IND(1), which will be described in a few pages. Since the determination of economic significance for a change is a manual process, economic flagging should not be enacted haphazardly. The only automatically applied exceptions to the blocking of mid-year changes are the presence, in the Micro File, of an invalid county code, such as '000', or an unknown county code ('999'). These are correcting erroneous codes, and may be adjusted at any time.
For a new account, or in the initial file build process, the county code should be specified. The county may also be supplied for any existing accounts. However, any mid-year code changes will be rejected, as previously noted, unless they are flagged as economically based. If it is known that no change of county code has occurred, or if the change is irrelevant, this field should be left as low-values.
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