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Initiating the process of providing portable Universal Account Numbers to members, retirement fund body EPFO today issued 41.7 million UANs to firms for seeding them with workers' KYCs like Aadhaar and bank account number.
An Employees' Provident Fund Organisation official said however that UANs would be operational in October as the process of seeding with the Know-your-customer (KYC) documents like Aadhaar would be completed by September 15.
UAN will improve the quality of service provided to workers in the organised sector as they would not have to apply for transfer of PF account claims on changing jobs. It will also help workers in the construction sector who often work at different locations with different contractors.
"UAN stands allocated to all 41.7 million members who have made contribution to EPFO in any one of the last 6 months. All these UANs have been disseminated to respective employers through OTCP (Online Transfer Claim) Portal," an EPFO office order for the field staff stated.
It said employers are supposed to log on to OTCP portal to collect the UAN allotted to their employees and disseminate that to the individual workers.
Besides, the employers, who maintain computerised database of workers' relating to KYC like Aadhaar/NPR, PAN card or bank account number, can seed those through the UAN Portal by sending a text file in pre-defined format.
The KYC data will automatically be seeded against the UAN of the members upon receipt of this information.
The EPFO wants that the firms must provide Aadhaar/NPR number of workers wherever available and bank A/c number as part of the KYC detail because it will enable EPFO in future to provide services directly to the beneficiaries without intermediation of the employers.
In case where employers does not maintain database of workers' KYC details, the EPFO has created a facility for individual members to upload the details on UAN portal through a personal log in on the member portal.
The individual subscribers are also expected to upload a scanned copy of the documents relied upon for quoting KYC on the Portal. The KYC furnished by individual members will be automatically captured by UAN database for seeding.
Asking field formations to expedite the work on UAN, the order said: "We have set an ambitious target for seeding of KYC which has to be concluded at the earliest by September 15. It is expected that all of you will rise to the present challenge and ensure that seeding for 100% of four crore members is done much before September 15.
