The EPFO has made the withdrawal process easier by doing away with the requirement of attaching a cancelled cheque or obtaining employer verification for bank accounts. This change is likely to enhance the speed of claim settlements for 80 million members and reduce the burden on employers.
Before, it was mandatory for EPFO members to attach a cheque or an attested bank passbook during online application for withdrawals. The employers also had to validate the bank details before the claims could be processed. The EPFO has now done away with these steps which were causing delays and high rejection rates due to poor quality of uploads.
A pilot project was started on May 28, 2024, for 1.7 crore EPF members and this is why this has been rolled out to all members. Since bank accounts are already verified at UAN seeding, there is no need for further verification, which means that claim settlements will be faster.
The employer verification process which used to take an average of 13 days was a major bottleneck. Now, 14.95 lakh pending approvals at the employer level will be immediately resolved. Out of the 7.74 crore contributing members, 4.83 crore have already linked their bank accounts with UAN.
Also, members can now change their bank details without any hassle through Aadhaar-based OTP authentication. This reform is in line with the government’s vision of ‘ease of living’ for employees and ‘ease of doing business’ for employers to make provident fund withdrawals easier.
