The Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) plans to replace the provident fund (PF) account number with a unique identification (UID) number, a move that would enable speedy transfer of subscribers’ funds in case of a job change and allow them to track their accounts online.
At present, if a subscriber changes his job, it takes months to transfer PF money from one account to another, as a transfer of records from one office to the other is required.
Under these circumstances, a large number of subscribers often withdraw the entire money in their account and go for a fresh account with the new employer. The replacement of PF account number with the UID number will be done after inter-connecting all regional and sub-offices of EPFO by March 2012.
“We are in the process of digitizing and inter-connecting all our offices. We plan to use UID as the subscribers account number after that,” Labour Secretary P C Chaturvedi said.
In the first phase, EPFO has set a target of digitalizing the entire data in its regional and sub-offices by March this year. In the second phase, all offices would be inter-connected.
