Bank a/c number will act as identity for your EPF while shifting jobs
NEW DELHI, FEB 7:
New provident fund subscribers may be required to furnish their bank account numbers for enrolment, not Aadhaar, as announced earlier by retirement fund body EPFO.
The bank account numbers are likely to be used as a subscriber’s unique identity number that will remain unchanged irrespective of the number of times a person changes jobs.
“The core banking account number of employers as well as employees will be almost like a unique number and can help us centrally manage the accounts,” a senior official of the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) toldBusiness Line.
Basically, the retirement fund body is working on creating a central database where all members would have a permanent account number and would not need to transfer accounts if they change jobs. At present, an individual who changes jobs ends up with multiple accounts since the process is so cumbersome, he said.
The EPFO staff has already been asked to collect core banking account numbers of all contributing members.
The official, however, made it clear that the accounts need to be in banks that were part of core banking, be it private, public sector or cooperative banks.
On Wednesday, EPFO, which handles the retirement funds of nearly five crore subscribers, withdrew its order issued on January 21, making it mandatory for new subscribers to produce a unique identity or Aadhaar number by March 1, 2013.
In its February 6 order to field staff, EPFO said “in view of discussion with UIDAI officials and the time required in the process of obtaining Aadhaar numbers, it may not be possible to obtain Aadhaar numbers by EPF members by March 1, 2013. Therefore, it has been decided to not to make Aadhaar number mandatory for EPFO members from March 1, 2013”.
The EPFO observed that getting the Aadhaar number was a time-consuming process and the scheme covered only 18 States. The other States are covered by the Register General of India under the National Population Register, the digital database of the country’s residents.
In its earlier order, the EPFO had issued a circular seeking to replace PF account numbers with Aadhaar numbers.
All trade unions had opposed the EPFO’s ‘suo motu’ move to make Aadhaar mandatory, saying that not all members had Aadhaar numbers as it did not cover all States.
No comments:
Post a Comment