Now PF claims to be settled in 15 days

Chennai:

Now one need not wait for 30 days to settle the provident fund claims after this November.

Employees' Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is working on mechanism to settle 90 per cent of claims within 15 days of their filing after November 30 this year.

Currently, EPFO receives more than 1.2 crore claims a year and 90 per cent of the claims are settled within a month.

“By November 30 this year we will reduce this 30 days deadline to 15 days, which means that 90 per cent of claims filed in the EPFO will be cleared within 15 days of their filing by November 30 positively,” said Central Provident Fund commissioner K K Jalan while inaugurating an industry interactive session organised by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM).

“Now we are working to reduce this 30 days to 15 days, in our 122 offices,” he said. Jalan said that currently 25 EPFO offices settle the claims within three days and three offices within a day. He also said that EPFO is working on computerized updation of beneficiary accounts.

“For further improvement in the EPFO, we are now computerising compliance section and next week we are launching computerised updation of beneficiary account. We will be releasing more than 12 crore statements online within next one-two weeks,” he said.

He further informed that currently about 40,000 cases are currently locked in courts with about Rs 3,450 crore locked up in these cases on non-recovery issues and he would bring some proposal regarding this before the CBT next time.

Jalan also said that he has proposed an amendment in the EPF Act for having multiple tribunals as few members had complained about having only one EPF tribunal. “As such we have proposed that we should have multiple tribunals as there should be a tribunal in every region or every zone so that cases are resolved much quicker,” he said.

On the issue of name changes, he said there is some issue about it and that EPFO is working on it. “We have endeavoured that within in next 30-40 days our system should be able to take care of the name change also.”