PF accounts can soon be accessed online
Subscribers of the employees provident fund organisation will soon be able to monitor their accounts online - a move that will serve the twin purpose of putting pressure on erring employers to make regular payments and nudging regional EPFO offices to update accounts regularly. The EPFO has already put in place a software for all its 120 regional offices for updating accounts year-wise that will help it meet the finance ministry's challenge of updating all pending accounts by September this year.
"I have set a target of updation of 1,000 accounts every day by each accounting official. This will hopefully help us update the pending 1.85 crore accounts well on time," Central Provident Fund Commissioner Samirendra Chatterjee told ET. The finance ministry had approved the 9.5% interest announced by the EPFO for its 4.72 crore subscribers for 2010-11 in March this year on the condition that it would update the pending 4.72 crore accounts within six months.
The EPFO has updated 2.87 crore accounts since then, Chatterjee said. "We have used the updation exercise as an opportunity to make the system as transparent as possible," he said, adding that it is now possible to monitor online the number of accounts pending updation at every regional office and the accounts that are getting updated each day. The software for accounts update has been developed in-house by the EPFO's technical staff who are now working on moving a step ahead by making information available on individual accounts on-line.
"Subscribers will only have to put in their account numbers and select their regional offices to see the amounts in their accounts up to the last update," Chatterjee said, adding that it was likely to be place in the next four months. This move will help subscribers keep atab on whether employers are making regular payments into their accounts and also whether EPFO offices are updating accounts regularly.
"Since the general public can now see the number of pending accounts with the EPFO, there will be a social pressure on the organisation of doing its job well," Chatterjee said. The EPFO handles about .`3.5 lakh crore corpus annually.
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