Provident fund may be withdrawn online from August 2016

Provident fund may be withdrawn online from August 2016

Three central data centres will be set up to process claims with Employees’ Provident Fund Organization.

New Delhi: Retirement fund body Employees’ Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) may launch by August an online facility to withdraw provident fund (PF), a move that will reduce paperwork and provide hassle-free service to subscribers.

With the new facility, settling PF withdrawal claims would just take few hours. “We are hopeful of launching an online facility for PF withdrawal claims by August this year. We have already digitized our records and processes using Oracle operating system,” a senior EPFO official said.

“EPFO will soon buy blade servers for setting up three central data centres in Gurgaon, Dwarka (Delhi) and Secunderabad. All the three centres will be connected to 123 offices of the EPFO,” he said.

The process of procuring servers would be completed by May while the testing would start in June to gauge the response of the system in place.

“After intensive testing and trials in June and July, we are planning to launch the online PF withdrawal facility in August this year,” the official said.

Once this is operational, subscribers can apply online for PF withdrawal, which will be transferred directly to their bank accounts. At present, subscribers who wish to settle their accounts with the EPFO are required to apply manually.

For settling online claims, the subscribers would have to activate their universal account numbers (UANs) which are seeded with KYC (know your customer) details including bank accounts, Aadhaar numbers and permanent account number.

The EPFO has over five crore subscribers. As many as 6.15 crore UANs were issued by EPFO out of which 2.34 crore were activated by subscribers so far.

Source : Livemint