EPFO’s subscribers to get accounts update in real time from Oct 16

Over four crore sub­scribers of the retire­ment fund body EPFO would be able to access their prov­i­dent fund accounts online on real time basis using a ded­i­cat­ed mem­bers’ web por­tal from Octo­ber 16. The Uni­ver­sal Account Num­ber (UAN) mem­ber’s por­tal will help Employ­ees’ Prov­i­dent Fund Organ­i­sa­tion’s (EPFO) to mon­i­tor whether their employ­ers are deposit­ing their PF con­tri­bu­tions. The UAN mem­bers’ por­tal is like­ly to be launched by Prime Min­is­ter Naren­dra Modi on Octo­ber 16, a senior offi­cial said adding that in the first phase the mem­bers’ accounts would be acces­si­ble and become portable for life­time. As the UAN will be a portable account, the for­mal sec­tor work­ers would not have to apply for trans­fer of PF accounts on chang­ing jobs.

The offi­cial said that even­tu­al­ly the EPFO would pro­vide more val­ue added ser­vices like paper­less set­tle­ment of prov­i­dent fund with­draw­al claims like dur­ing retire­ment and fix­ing of pen­sion after attain­ing the age of 58 years. Accord­ing to him, the EPFO is on track to com­plete the seed­ing of over four crore UANs issued in the last week of July this year.

As per the infor­ma­tion uploaded on the web­site of the EPFO, there are 4.18 crore con­tribut­ing mem­bers who are employed in 4.3 lakh dif­fer­ent firms across the coun­try. At present, EPFO has already cap­tured bank account details in respect of 2.04 crore employ­ees, PAN details of 92.94 lakh employ­ees and Aad­har num­ber in respect of 35.4 lakh workers.

The offi­cial said that in order to improve the qual­i­ty of ser­vice under the UAN pro­gramme, at least bank account num­ber of all the mem­bers need to be seed­ed with portable PF accounts as this would make the PF with­draw­al and oth­er claims set­tle­ments less time consuming.

EPFO has recent­ly made it manda­to­ry for firms to pro­vide their employ­ees’ bank account num­bers with IFSC code of bank branch to facil­i­tate allot­ment of uni­ver­sal PF account num­ber and pay­ment to its subscribers.

As per an office order, the firms would have to fur­nish the infor­ma­tion regard­ing the core bank­ing account num­ber with IFSC code of the bank branch in respect of exist­ing mem­bers by Octo­ber 15.